This revival of Arthur Miller’s slowly detonating study of illicit desire in a 1950s Italian-American household is advertised as a “timeless masterpiece” but the production, in many ways, appears a relic of that time.
There is much that creaks, from the expositional framing device of the lawyer as omniscient narrator to what seems like a dated portrait of working-class masculinity in crisis through the central figure of longshoreman Eddie Carbone, tormented by his niece Catherine’s romance with an illegal immigrant, Rodolpho, whom he harbours in his home.