Splendid Suchet seals the deal with sly skill
The Price (Theatre Royal Bath) Verdict: Suchet is top dollar ★★★★✩
YOU always hope for a big pay off at the end of an Arthur Miller play. And, as often as not, you get it. His work from the Fifties and Sixties specialised in laying bare the emotional and psychological tribulations of the hard-grafting little guy at the frontier of the American dream.
This 1968 drama, starring David Suchet and Brendan Coyle, is just such a piece. It’s about two brothers returning to the family home 28 years after their father was ruined by the Wall Street Crash and 16 years since he died.
Coyle is the brother who gave up a promising career to become a cop and look after Dad.
Adrian Lukis is the one who struck out to become a wealthy surgeon.
And Sara Stewart is Coyle’s wife, grown tired of postponing her own dreams for the lean rewards of personal integrity.
But the standout performance comes from Suchet as the elderly East European émigré who’s come to offer a nice price for the father’s possessions.
The idea is that we all pay a price to get by in life. For Coyle’s character, it’s personal fulfilment. For Lukis’s doctor, it’s selling his soul and sacrificing his marriage to play the system for all that it’s worth.
And for Stewart, it’s a lifetime of propping up a frustrated man.
Suchet is the catalyst who changes their chemistry, with a cash offer for their furniture. But he’s also a cunning survivor who teaches them how to get by, having made it through war-torn Europe and lost a daughter to suicide. At two hours and 40 minutes, this is a long, but fascinating, evening that subtly delineates the regrets and compromises that make a life — as well as the games we play to hide this from ourselves.
But the beauty of Jonathan Church’s forensic production is Simon Higlett’s precipitous design, which places the four characters under a tsunami of furniture.
This tidal wave of bric-a-brac rears over them like a high roller in a Hokusai painting and represents the clutter of their shared history, which threatens to break over them at any moment.
All the talk can be laborious, especially at the start, when Stewart tries to goad her dogged husband into action.
Coyle is a stolidly good man (as he is in Downton Abbey), but I never really felt that this was his last chance at redemption.
HE MAY be true to his character, but not to the audience’s hopes for the carthasis of an emotional High noon.
The same applies to Lukis, who is typically intelligent as the successful doctor, but remains emotionally intact.
Instead, it’s Suchet who really warrants the price of your ticket. In his baggy Forties pinstripe suit, he conjures up a deceptively shambling performance, bringing the stage to life with his tobacco-stained voice, bartering and charming the others so that they hardly notice his rabbinical ways.
When he stops to eat a boiled egg, it seems like eccentricity. And when he snaps his fingers, counting dollar bills, it seems like showmanship.
But therein lies Miller’s message: it’s life’s character actors who make it through the night with their quirks and rituals, while the high-flyers crash and the lowflyers flounder.