The last time Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge was performed at the Royal Lyceum, in 1989, Kenny Ireland played Eddie Carbone. Ireland now directs Matt Costello in the part; he, in turn, played Eddie while at drama college with his partner, Kathryn Howden, playing Beatrice. The couple are repeating that experience in this production, now at about the right age. Confused? You won't be.
For Miller's writing is about all our lives, and remains so despite social change and alleged progress. The setting for A View from the Bridge might be the Sicilian-American area of Brooklyn in the 1950s, but in its portrayal of how communities, from individual families upwards, deal with the presence of outsiders, the play still resonates.
The Italian immigrants being sheltered by close-knit communities in the tenement blocks can't help but make us think of asylum-seekers across Europe: the furious vitriol meted out to them from some quarters, the lack of communities ready to welcome them. When Carbone yells his anguished, broken plea, "I want my name", it articulates all the insecurity that forms tabloid fury now.
But Miller never tackles issues without a human dimension to them. Here it's the fate of Carbone, the working man who has taken in his wife's niece and raised her as his own. His unspeakable and unspoken love for her scars the family interactions - every meal, every edgy exchange between him and Beatrice. When love arrives for her in the form of Rodolpho, a family drama becomes the stuff of classic tragedy, "a high visible arc moving in full view to a single explosion" as Miller once described the play.
Ireland's production is very nearly perfect, with only a few uneven accents and a slightly cool and underwhelming first act detracting from an otherwise compelling evening. Costello and Howden shine as Eddie and Beatrice, their lives ready to snap into dysfunction at any moment. If anything, Howden's Beatrice, the long-suffering and self- deluding broken woman, has the edge. In the second act especially, her every move - to clear the table or to make love to Eddie - has palpable tragedy running through it.
When a production of the play gets the central couple right, as this does, then it's the smaller details that make the difference between a perfunctory and memorable performance. The music here is perfect, all aching, impending menace, while Saul Radomsky's set of the house's interior, with its openness and yet hidden, interior depths, is powerfully suggestive. Everything is lit as if Edward Hopper was directing an episode of Happy Days. The result is the American Dream gone more badly wrong than we have words to say.
Until 10 March. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
