The Price is right on target
Sees Arthur Miller’s revived in Bath and predicts a West End hit for David Suchet and Co
Undervalued at its 1968 premiere and underappreciated since then, Arthur Miller’s The Price stands confirmed, in Jonathan Church’s exemplary revival at Bath, as one of the most richly affecting plays ever written about family resentment and the corrosive business of determining who gave what, who got what, who’s owed what, and who decides what’s fair.
Though arriving some way after Miller’s onrush of post-war masterpieces, it hews away at the same seam of grievance. Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is eaten up with the thought that, after a lifetime of toil, it was all in vain. Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge has bust a gut for his niece and obsesses that he hasn’t been given his dues. Even Joe Keller in
All My Sons, whose fortune rests on culpable acts of wrongdoing and blame-shifting, cleaves to the belief that he has compromised himself – and sacrificed his son – for the greater good.
David Suchet was unforgettable as the inwardly anguished Keller in Howard Davies’ West End revival eight years ago. He proves no less mesmerising as Gregory Solomon. This wise, wisecracking elderly New York Jewish furniture dealer has been called in to evaluate a mountain of fittings piled in the attic of a condemned brownstone (the looming chattels rendered in Simon Higlett’s astonishing design like a suspended tsunami).
The characterful 89-year-old has been summoned by Victor, a police sergeant who grew up in this house and is hoping – hopes nudged aggressively by his discontented wife Esther – that the inherited stash may yield enough dough to help lift him out of his low-paying dead-end job.
It sounds straightforward enough yet Solomon has stepped into a psychological battlefield – the contours of which follow Miller’s own personal history of traumatic financial loss and paternal failure.
When Victor’s estranged brother Walter belatedly breezes in, just as the deal is being struck, he’s all generosity – happy to let Victor cash in. The catch is that Victor never got to complete his medical studies like his affluent sibling – he felt compelled to take on the role of carer to their failed businessman father. To let Walter dictate benevolent terms would be a kind of surrender, an acceptance that the “debt” can, at a stroke, be written off.
What’s superb about the play is that it raises weighty questions with the lightest of touches. And that craft is answered by this revival, which serves Miller’s thought-provoking themes with emotion-stirring truthfulness.
We know from Poirot that Suchet excels at the beady look and cogitative air. As the stooped, antiquated Solomon, he walks off with the show even when you’re barely watching, poised between harmless figure of fun and hard-bitten survivor. He has the best lines but delivers them not as scripted gags but as expressive of a fully-inhabited personality: “A man sits down to such a table, he knows not only he’s married, he’s got to stay married,” he offers, shrugging with spontaneous-meets-strategic ruefulness. “If they would build old hotels I could sell this!”
He’s rejuvenated by the task – dancing a jig as he tries on a top hat, reliving implausible-sounding acrobat days in front of a mirror. Yet there are moments when we share with him a growing, profound despair at the stubbornness that threatens to nix the siblings’ potential reconciliation.
There are matchingly highdefinition performances all round. Brendan Coyle seems equally to have walked the walk as the doleful, grudgingly admiring cop, who forlornly thinks that he has spent all his life living a dream. Sara Stewart is first-rate, too, as his smart, resentful spouse. And Adrian Lukis completes the quartet as the smooth, apparently self-possessed and satisfied doctor who desperately craves the shot in the arm of fraternal acceptance. On for too brief a run at the Theatre Royal, this could, in my humble estimation, prove box-office gold in the West End.