It is easy to dismiss the current trend for casting film and television stars in stage plays as the theatrical equivalent of breast enhancement surgery, trading authenticity for instant allure. The problem is that while not all movie stars can act, many of them are genuinely charismatic performers. In the past few years, I've seen Nicole Kidman, Kevin Kline, John Goodman, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Kevin Spacey, Angela Bassett, Uma Thurman and Alec Baldwin on stage. All have been interesting to watch and some (Hoffman, Kidman, Dennehy and Spacey) are electrifying on stage. Some people still become rich and famous because there are actually very, very good at what they do.

One of them is Christopher Meloni, star of Law and Order and Oz, who takes the lead role of Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller's 1955 tragedy A View from the Bridge at the Gate. Like Anthony LaPaglia, who made his name in Murder One before playing Eddie on Broadway a few years ago, Meloni is the real thing - a tremendously forceful presence with all the confidence that fame brings and none of the self-indulgence. The only traces of his screen career on show here are the focus, discipline and clarity of intent that presumably have to be learned in the industrialised process of a slick TV drama series.

Meloni's inherent quality is more than enough justification for this casting here, but there is a further logic to his presence. A View from the Bridge is part of a larger cultural moment in 1950s America when left-leaning intellectuals began to contemplate blue- collar masculinity - the proletarian archetype - with a strange mixture of attraction and anxiety. Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is an obvious forerunner of Eddie in A View from the Bridge. Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan's film On the Waterfront appeared the year before Miller's play. Both of these attempts to anatomise the macho male were, of course, embodied by Marlon Brando. What makes the play at once so fascinating and so problematic is that it is as much an engagement with the Brando mystique as with the realities of blue-collar life.

There are two ways to deal with this obvious debt, not just to another writer (Williams) but to a particular actor. One is to deny it, which Miller himself tried to do by framing the story of Eddie's obsession with the orphaned niece he has raised as a timeless classical tragedy. The lawyer Alfieri (beautifully played here by John Kavanagh) acts as a chorus and underscores the action with references to Syracuse, Rome, Greece and Carthage. But this sits uneasily with the Freudian world-view that drives the play. Eddie's impotence with his wife (played with typical elegance and intelligence by Cathy Belton), desire for his niece Catherine (Laura Murphy), and hatred for her would-be lover, the illegal immigrant Rodolpho (Paul Reid) create a seething psychological stew flavoured by incestuous desires and repressed homosexuality. The mock-Greek form feels like a neo-classical facade on a modern brothel.

The better option therefore is to embrace the play as a product of its times, with all its borrowings from Williams and Brando and all its neurotic ambiguities about traditional masculinity. This is essentially what the distinguished New York director Mark Brokaw does here, using a broadly realistic set by Mark Wendland and superbly evocative costumes by Leonore McDonagh to create a precise sense of time and place. It is Meloni who makes this a viable option, for he has the scale and the star quality not to fear Brando's shadow but to illuminate with a supremely self-possessed, assertive and authentic performance.

Meloni revivifies method acting, not as a set of tics and mannerisms, but as a search for utter conviction. Everything about him belongs to a 1950s Brooklyn longshoreman - the V-shaped upper body, the heavy walk of a man used to balancing on rough surfaces, the hands that dangle like implements, the pained struggle between the desire to be decent and the physical power to impose his will. He moves with a wonderful combination of raw potency and tentative delicacy. Thoughts pass across his big, open face like clouds projected on a screen. When Alfieri tells us that Eddie's "eyes were like tunnels", we look at Meloni, and they are.