Writer: Arthur Miller
Director: Holly Race Roughan
The events that make up the tragedy in this brilliant play are visible from the outset and the inability of anyone to get out of their way is terrifying to watch and wonderfully enacted by an outstanding cast. The impotence of all the characters is powerfully embodied. Jonathan Slinger as Eddie Carbone and Kirsty Bushell as his despairing wife Beatrice fill the stage with their desperation. It is a pair of performances for the ages.
In the Italian enclave of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a pair of illegal immigrants comes to live with Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman, his wife Beatrice, and Catherine, the orphaned niece they have raised since she was a baby. Catherine is just eighteen, and one of the men who comes to stay has a sense of fun and adventure that has been ground away from the older men. He likes to sing; they like to sit down with a beer after working for twelve hours. It’s really easy to see why Catherine likes him, and why Eddie doesn’t, and it’s from that conflict that the tragedy develops.
There are some questionable symbolic flourishes – a sequence where the backbreaking labour of the longshoremen of Brooklyn is represented by the carrying of chairs, which actually undermines the symbolic importance of a real chair at the end of act one, and a recurrent ballet with a buff longshoreman dancing in a sea of dry ice. They look like hangovers from an earlier, more poetic reading of the play. Its power, however, is in its naturalism. The terrible consequences of everyday betrayals. As in Greek tragedy, the events flow from Eddie Carbone’s personal flaws, but the Immigration police are much more real than a Sphinx, and in context, just as scary, just as consequential.
All the performances are excellent – Rachelle Diedericks makes Catherine’s naivety charming as well as dangerous, and her two-handers with Jonathan Slinger are tender and sensitive, and hint at more problematic, less straightforward feelings, without ever beating the audience over the head with them. Luke Newberry brings a lightness to the character of Rodolpho that contrasts effectively with the denim-clad dourness of the American dockworkers. He has a sense of style and glamour that is cause for deep suspicion in Red Hook and makes him hugely attractive to Catherine.
Rodolpho’s brother Marco has a family back home in Sicily. He came to America to work, to send money home, and to escape desperate poverty. It is a relatively small part, but Tommy Sim’aan invests every moment he is on stage with pent-up energy and channelled force. He says little but represents much. It is a hugely telling, beautifully developed support performance that goes towards making this show outstanding
No less important, Nancy Crane’s Alfieri, a lawyer who acts as a chorus, a servant of the law unable to divert the oncoming disaster, who sees with clarity, advises with honour and knows her advice will make no difference. She provides a view from the Bridge, a way into the tribalism that is on display, a powerful representation of impotence.
But it is the anguish of Eddie Carbone and the despair of his wife that drive the story, and Slinger and Bushell are never less than magnificent. Every shift in the narrative is felt, every step towards the climax is resisted but inexorable. Both actors have the singular courage to be abject, and both actors make their flawed, sometimes unlikeable, confused characters resonate long after they have quit the stage. They are both spell-binding, both superb.
Runs until 11 November 2023
