Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

The Greenwich & Docklands International Festival is best known for outdoor spectaculars, so its good to see them include a classic play. Flemish company de Roovers first staged it with Antwerp docks passing for the Brooklyn longshore. Now Greenwich Peninsula and the Thames riverbank pose as Red Hook with the skyscrapers of Docklands standing in for lower Manhattan. It’s an inspired idea.

Arthur Miller’s play is like a Greek tragedy, but an Italian American one, involving longshoreman Eddie Carbone, his wife Beatrice, his niece Catherine and two other relatives, Rodolpho and Marco, illegal immigrants from Sicily seeking better lives than they can have in post-war Italy. Eddie is possessive of Catherine; they are close, too close, and as she develops a relationship with Rodolpho, Eddie becomes racked with jealousy, with tragic consequences. I particularly liked the way they represented the way Eddie’s life is turned upside-down by the developing relationship.

At the end of a sweltering week. it was cold and windy and this somehow added dramatic effect, with dust blowing across the playing area and brooding cloud cover above the skyscrapers. The sparseness, with just a platform and chair representing the Carbone living room and the phone box specified in Miller’s stage directions, added to the atmosphere, as does the soundtrack by a live trio. It was reasonably faithful to Miller, but I wish they hadn’t changed the ending, as this added a touch of implausibility to go with its heightened dramatic effect.

With the actors all of a similar age, you do have to suspend disbelief and imagine the youth of Catherine and Rodolpho, and why on earth the lawyer Alfieri broke into a manic dance during one of his later pieces of narration is beyond me, but these were the only things that jarred in an atmospheric telling of a classic tale.