Ivo van Hove is an audacious Belgian whose production of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, seen at the Barbican last November, was a model of hyper-realism. But his highly impressive revival of Arthur Miller's 1955 Brooklyn drama goes to the opposite extreme by stripping the play of naturalistic detail and returning it to its roots in Greek tragedy.
The action, in Jan Versweyveld's design, is played out on a long, rectangular platform that resembles a sunken bath; and the extraordinary opening image shows the longshoreman, Eddie Carbone, and a colleague standing beneath what might be a purifying, or possibly elemental, torrent of water. But signs of the ensuing tragedy are instantly apparent. When Eddie returns home, his niece Catherine leaps exuberantly into his arms and wraps her bare thighs round his torso. Their relationship is clearly tactile and intimately physical. And, when Catherine falls for Rodolfo, one of the two Sicilian immigrants lodging in Eddie's home, we know there can only be one outcome.
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