Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge -- or at least refashioned his earlier one-act version into the play we now know -- during 1956.

Robert Gwilym plays tough dock worker Eddie

Since this was also the year in which he married the legendary Marilyn Monroe, one might rather wonder at the gloomy tone of the drama. Didn't he, much more than most men, have a great deal to be happy about?

No doubt his presentation of the alluring young woman at the centre of the action owed something to the excitement in his private life, although the naive young Catherine (Katherine Holme) is a mile removed from the streetwise Monroe.

Just 17 and an orphan, she lives with her aunt and uncle in a waterfront apartment close to Brooklyn Bridge. Expatriate Italians all, they are part of a close-knit community whose menfolk labour in the docks.

The women lead a life of drudgery at home, but the fact that this is hard graft is not always appreciated. "You don't work," says the gruff and brooding Eddie (Robert Gwilym, a familiar face as Max Gallagher in TV's Casualty) as his wife Beatrice clears up after another meal she has cooked for him.

As presented in a beautifully judged performance from Sorcha Cusack, she is a woman who does what must be done -- uncomplaining and resigned, the steady centre about which other lives revolve. Yet she is clearly very worried, for she has seen the tendresse which has developed between Eddie and their young charge. It is a love unrecognised as such by either of those involved, and certainly by Catherine. She is always joshing and kissing her uncle, and sees nothing amiss in joining him in the bathroom as he performs his morning ablutions.

Trouble lies ahead, however, when two young brothers -- relations of Beatrice's -- come to stay, illegal immigrants both.

The gentle giant Marco (Matthew Flynn) is already married, indeed is only in New York to earn money to send home for the care of his three children back in Sicily. His Jack-the-lad brother Rodolpho (Tadeusz Pasternak) is, however, footloose and fancy free.

Dancing and singing his way into Catherine's heart, he simultaneously comes to be an object of hatred for Eddie. He is convinced that the blond-haired boy, whom he believes to be homosexual, is only courting the girl so he can marry her and thereby gain legal status in the country. That sexual jealousy is the real reason for his dislike seems never to occur to him.

The play advances towards its conclusion with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, with the function of Chorus, commenting on and introducing the action, performed by the world-weary lawyer (Benny Young) who becomes peripherally involved in this saddest of stories. Well acted by all involved under director Kenny Ireland, the play continues until Saturday and should not be missed.