Is it an innocent domestic moment or a portent of something more ominous? It happens early enough in Jemima Levick’s thrilling production – her debut as the Tron’s artistic director – to leave some doubt. But when Mark Holgate’s Eddie Carbone emerges from the onstage shower, his torso glistening as he steps out in his boxers, you do fear for his niece’s safety. Should they really be alone together?
Excellently played by newcomer Holly Howden Gilchrist, Catherine is a complex jumble of vulnerability and assurance, at once naive and sharp, a teenager bursting with youthful energy and adult ambition. Sharing close quarters with the decent-but-flawed Eddie in Arthur Miller’s classic, she is an unwitting catalyst for his tragic downfall. In the words of Nicholas Karimi’s lawyer Alfieri, “there is too much love for the niece”, even if Eddie cannot see it himself.
The force of this central dilemma overpowers all others, limiting Levick’s attempts to politicise the story with a wider comment on refugees. Alex Lowde’s imposing set, a shipping container in pale grey where the family sit on plastic crates and eat on their laps, takes us deep into the modern-day docks of Brooklyn, while his costumes, a mismatched collection of tracksuits and tight tops, suggest the poverty that has beset generations of immigrants since the play’s debut in 1955.
Of course, in Michael Guest’s Rodolpho, as tough as he is emancipated, and Reuben Joseph’s Marco, no-nonsense and principled, we see the familiar drive of the migrant for a better future. But on this showing, the play is most persuasive not as a commentary on economic displacement but in its view of the social impact of one man’s actions.
Nowhere does this hit home more devastatingly than in Eddie’s closest family. The first-half heart-to-heart between Nicole Cooper’s Beatrice and her niece Catherine is performed with painful sensitivity, as one fights to cling on to her husband, the other to her childhood. Rich in knowing glances and withering looks, this is a real family, swinging from affection to antagonism by the line. For his part, Holgate charts a careful course from jolly patriarch to a man brutishly possessed. His solitary stand rips at the fabric of the community.
• At the Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 15 March
