Dominic West settles comfortably into the role of the rumpled, fatally flawed longshoreman Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s 1956 drama, a tale of Italian-Americans heavily indebted to Greek tragedy.
The part of Eddie, whose suppressed, illicit passion for his niece presages his downfall, requires rough charm, burly physicality and – in the histrionic final scenes – a capacity for anguished roaring.
In his first stage role in nine years, the star of The Wire and The Crown absolutely delivers all of the above. He has fine support from Kate Fleetwood as Eddie’s pinched wife Beatrice, Nia Towle as the disconcerted object of his affection, and It’s a Sin’s Callum Scott Howells as the young Sicilian who steals her away.
Though the theme of immigration makes the story feel newly contemporary, Lindsay Posner’s production, which originated at Bath’s Ustinov Studio, feels staid and old-fashioned. It sometimes inspires titters when it should provoke shock and awe.
Peter McKintosh’s set of towering, grimy clapboard walls and fire escapes evokes the oppressive, impoverished proximity in which the working-class Italian community live in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Eddie, Beatrice and Catherine are squeezed into a tiny living room with no rug and no tablecloth. Yet their house is a castle, and their status as American citizens unimaginably privileged to Beatrice’s starving cousins.
Brothers Marco (Pierro Niel-Mee) and Rodolpho (Howells) arrive to work illegally on the docks, sending money back to starving relatives while also paying off the people smugglers who shipped them over. Though Miller doesn’t specifically reference America’s fevered 1950s politics, the air is thick with paranoia, for the economic migrants, their hosts and the authorities hunting them.
The domestic atmosphere is sour too. “When am I gonna be a wife again, Eddie?” Beatrice asks, before Eddie’s incestuous feelings have even been addressed.
Fleetwood is terrific, careworn and exhausted, her face visibly hardening as she realises the worst. Relative newcomer Towle, too, is impressive, as a girl nonplussed by the emergence of her adult sexuality. Howells and Neil-Mee have accents as clotted as canoli - so laboured they must surely be authentic, but comically problematic all the same.
The play’s self-important fatalism is laid on thick by the chorus-like commentary of Martin Marquez’s helplessly observing lawyer Alfieri. The body language of all the characters is oddly studied too, as if they are literally going through the motions of their outsized feelings.
The hyper-realism of Posner’s production feels less apt for this mid-century play than the intense stylisation Ivo van Hove brought to the last major London staging, with Mark Strong as Carbone, in 2015.
It'll do fine, though. The West End may have got decidedly more nimble and experimental recently, but there’s still a place for solid, star-led revivals of classics. And that’s precisely what we’ve got here.
