The Price
This 1968 play by the great dramatist of the fractured American Dream isn’t one of Arthur Miller’s best. But The Price is compelling in its uncompromising cynicism, originally written as a rebuke to how Miller perceived the abstract, consequence-free tone of 1960s theatre.
New York cop Victor (Elliot Cowan) has returned with his wife, Esther (Faye Castelow), to his long-dead father’s home to sell off the furniture before the house is demolished. This re-opens old wounds about what he feels he sacrificed to care for his bankrupted parent while his brother, Walter (John Hopkins), became a doctor.
A heavyweight creative team led by director Jonathan Munby makes the weight of this past almost tangible. With Anna Watson’s lighting picking out chairs and lamps and mementos as if they were bones, Jon Bausor’s forced-perspective set is mausoleum-like. There’s a dusty, stifling density to the piles of things that crowd out the stage.
Into this tale of family strife drops wily furniture dealer Gregory (Henry Goodman), knocking on 90 years old and a man of many lives. He’s someone who – in contrast to everyone else on stage – relentlessly adapts to the present rather than hopelessly seeking meaning, blame or absolution in the past. Nostalgia isn’t his game.
He’s a show-stopping character, played to twinkly inscrutable perfection by Goodman, whose shambolic bluster hovers beguilingly between sincerity and lived-in pragmatism as he informs Victor that these things from his past don’t...