For the first time in its history, Canberra Repertory Society is presenting Arthur Miller's classic play A View from the Bridge. Often seen as the third of his great works - along with Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, both previously produced by Rep - the play is being directed by a newcomer to Canberra making his Rep directorial debut, Chris Baldock.

Baldock - who had an award-winning directorial career in Melbourne before taking up a teaching position at the National Acting School - says Miller originally wrote Bridge as a one-act verse play staged with with A Memory of Two Mondays in 1955. When it flopped on Broadway he rewrote it as the play we know now, a two-act prose drama that was a big hit in London the following year.

Miller was inspired to write Bridge after hearing the basic story from a lawyer who worked with longshoremen and related it as fact and also by his experiences with director Elia Kazan who had directed Miller's plays All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. They had worked on an unproduced screenplay dealing with corruption on the New York docks but when Kazan named Communist names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities it ended their friendship. Kazan later made the film On the Waterfront with writer Budd Schulberg - another "friendly witness" before HUAAC - in which "informing" is presented in a more sympathetic light.

Another source of inspiration was his personal life.

"He was having a love affair with Marillyn Monroe while married," Baldock says. Eventually he would divorce his first wife, Mary Slattery and marry the movie star in 1956; they divorced in 1961.

All of these elements - the story from the New York docks, family and community life, sex, betrayal - were combined in the final play. It's been revived multiple times on Broadway including a production with Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia

A View from the Bridge is set in Brooklyn in the 1950s. The story is narrated by Alfieri (David Bennett),the titular "bridge" between the European and American cultures who immigrated and now works as an American lawyer. Italian-American Eddie Carbone (played by Knox Peden), a longshoreman, or wharfie, lines up every day with his friends to try to get work on the docks. He's married to Beatrice (Karen Vickery) and they look after her orphaned 17-year-old niece Catherine (Karina Hudson).

Into the Carboni household come two "submarines", or illegal immigrants, Marco (Chris Zuber) and Rodolpho (Alexander Clubb). They are cousins of Beatrice who have been sent over to work on the docks and pay back their passage from their earnings. The fact that the "submarines" get preferential treatment for work assignments on the docks doesn't ease an already volatile situation. But the tensions on the waterfront are nothing compared to what's happening in the Carbone home.

"One of the problems is that Eddie has an obsession with Catherine and doesn't understand it. When she falls for Rodolpho, all hell breaks loose."

Baldock says the clash of personalities and generations and old and new worlds is comparable in its impact to a Greek tragedy. He's added to this sense by expanding the cast to include a "Greek chorus" of community members watching the drama unfold.

Peden is also a newcomer to Canberra theatre, acting in his first show here. Originally from Dallas, Texas, the ANU philosophy academic says Eddie Carbone is "the role of a lifetime" and describes the character as "a really tragic figure".

He says Eddie is "trying to do well, trying to provide for his family, trying to honour his wife" but he is tormented by passions he can't bring himself to acknowledge when it comes to Catherine who is becoming a woman.

"If he admitted them to himself, he would be a bad person and he can't admit that to himself."

Eddie tries to dissuade Catherine from a relationship with Rodolpho by bringing up ostensibly legitimate, fatherly concerns - what if he's just using you to gain citizenship? what if his love of singing is a sign his masculinity is suspect? - and when that doesn't work resorts to increasingly desperate measures leading to a shocking act of betrayal that has drastic consequences. One scene between Eddie and Rodolpho, Baldock says, had stunning impact on audiences in the 1950s and can still cause a frisson today.

There's considerable amount of ambiguity in the play concerning some of both Eddie and Rodolpho's motivations: Miller provides little guidance in the script and, as in real life, the actors are working it out for themselves. Baldock says he told Clubb to decide whether Rodolpho was sincere in courting Catherine and not tell anyone until after the closing night.

As for Eddie, Peden says it's ambiguous in the script by the play's end whether or not he's accepted the truth about himself and his life. He, too, has come to his own conclusions to inform his interpretation and audiences can work out the answers for themselves.