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 have intrinsic value; it’s about what’s in style now. He’s the blunt face of capitalism in a crumpled coat.
Cowan impresses in the more thankless role of the tortured sibling, capturing the quiet desperation that underlies Victor’s resentment of Walter: his need to hold on to his misery in order to give his choices meaning. When Walter – played with an effective, brittle slickness by Hopkins – equally self-servingly challenges this version of events, it’s explosive. Esther is caught in the middle of this, with Castelow shading in a tangle of love and anger.
If the first half of the play sees Gregory bartering with Victor over the financial value of the furniture, the second act revolves around a mirroring battle to determine the cost of the past, with Walter’s proffer of a job to Victor his attempt to buy forgiveness and own the story. Miller very thickly underlines the idea that everything is transactional.
While it’s thrilling to see talented actors really knock chunks out of each other, with Munby excavating every ounce of pain from their performances, a sense of drag also begins to set in, as Miller circles the same arguments.
There’s also something structurally awkward about how Gregory is shunted off into a side bedroom after the interval to make room for Miller’s replay of the story of the Prodigal Son. His occasional reappearances feel increasingly jarring. He becomes a weird sort of guest star.
But there’s some seriously meaty material here about how we take ownership of our lives when value is relative. Even a lesser Miller is greater than most.
