When the government announced that it was planning to inject a much-needed £25m into British theatre, it surely didn't intend that all £25m would be spent on sets. I keep going to regional theatres where the premise big is beautiful seems to have taken root. Simon Higlett's design for Arthur Miller's Greek tragedy, transposed to the Italian-American community in Brooklyn bay in the mid-1950s, is certainly big and undoubtedly very beautiful. So beautifully detailed, in fact, in its re-creation of the living conditions of longshoreman Eddie Carbone and his family, that it does an awful lot of the director's work for him.
The point is that it seems a mistake to think that big spaces such as those at Birmingham Rep or West Yorkshire Playhouse have to be filled up. In good theatre, size doesn't matter. A gesture, or even a look, can fill up the most cavernous space and make it seem intimate. You don't need something nice to look at. Particularly not as Toby Frow's production has plenty to commend it, not least Corey Johnson's driven Eddie, whose obsession with his niece Catherine could be seen in part as a man going through a mid-life crisis. Jonjo O'Neill is also very good as the shock-headed and clownish Rodolpho suggesting very well the otherness that Eddie detects and refuses to accept.
Abigail McKern also makes you see the pain of being - and not being - Eddie's wife, and Mido Hamada suggests all the watchful and pent up fury of Marco, whom life deals a bum hand. It is perhaps as much the fault of Miller - a measured writer, not a passionate one - as it is Frow's that the play doesn't quite capture the headlong rush into inevitable tragedy that it demands. It is slightly difficult to tell, however, as on Thursday night the actors were forced to be heroic in the face of one particular school or college party that was suffering from such a bad case of theatre hooliganism they should have been given a red card.
· Until October 18. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
