If Arthur Miller had not got there first, you might call this play a crucible. Certainly that is how it feels in Holly Race Roughan’s thrilling production for Headlong and partners. On Moi Tran’s oily black set, overlooked by a wood-panelled walkway like a prying courthouse corridor, the director creates laboratory conditions for a collision of elemental forces.
In this everyman tragedy about Eddie Carbone, a Brooklyn longshoreman whose inappropriate feelings for his niece lead to a betrayal of his extended family, Miller evoked primal passions. The playwright was thinking of the archetypal inevitability of Greek drama as well as the inviolability of Sicilian codes of honour. Juxtaposed with the niceties of US justice, these ancient forces seem wild and untameable, emotional logic carrying a power greater than the quiet voice of reason.
With the space cleared of everything but the odd chair and a couple of record players, Race Roughan liberates those passions. In the early part especially, she plays the drama like an accordion, a dynamic sequence of affectionate domestic scenes punctuated by bursts of energy and moments of calm. She lets us hear this set-text favourite afresh.
Nancy Crane sets the pace as the lawyer Alfieri, delivering her chorus-like prologue with an easy conversational air. The tremendous trio of Jonathan Slinger, Kirsty Bushell and Rachelle Diedericks as Eddie, wife Beatrice and niece Catherine make free and fluid use of the space, their fondness for each other giving every impression that they have never read to the end of the play. Eddie’s subsequent fall from grace is all the more tragic because of the loving home life he has lost.
The arrival of “submarines” Marco and Rodolpho (Tommy Sim’aan and Luke Newberry) upsets the balance, yet the respect of these illegal immigrants for Eddie is no less than the affection shown by Catherine. Their only crime is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If the addition of a pirouetting docker over-eggs the homoerotic pudding, the careful work laid down in the first half pays dividends as the play hurtles towards its ending. The true tragedy is in the intractable dilemma faced by Beatrice and Catherine for loving a man who is beyond salvation.
• At the Octagon, Bolton, until 30 September. Then touring until 11 November.
