• The Price

6/14/26 (Sun), London

I caught this acclaimed London revival of Arthur Miller’s 1967 work on its final day. Victor, who gave up his scientist dreams to take care of his late father, is selling off the father’s furniture. The father was once wealthy, employing chauffeurs and rowing, but fell into hard times with the Depression and never recovered. Their prior wealth is symbolized by a large harp that hovers in the back, which their long-gone mother used to play. A furniture broker, an elderly Jewish man from the old country fittingly named Solomon, agrees to buy the entire lot for a fixed price. Just as he is about to pay Victor, the latter’s estranged younger brother Walter enters. Walter abandoned the father and family and became a successful doctor. He has not seen his elder brother in 18 years. Fireworks emerge as the brothers challenge each other over the paths that they have taken, the lies that have sustained them – and the price that each has paid.

The show has been fairly criticized for the hairpin curve it takes after the broadly comical first half into the fiery second half. But Miller’s writing is among the most natural of all the plays of his that I’ve seen, even taking into account the Catskills humor of Solomon’s character, and it was never less than credible. Solomon is something new for Miller but makes the drama tolerable in a different manner from, say, All My Sons, Salesman and The Crucible, all of which have had major London runs in recent years. (Miller seems more appreciated in the UK than the US; I also remember a terrific production of Incident at Vichy.)

In the revelations that emerge as the brothers battle each other, neither comes off as either totally innocent or guilty. Victor uses self-sacrifice to justify his insecurity, while Walter pursues riches to an extreme that destroys his own family life. Walter offers his brother a job opportunity, but the latter rejects this as a disparaging attempt by Walter to sweep in after nearly two decades and use money to clear his own conscience, even as the wife urges Victor to free himself from his demons. The mistaken beliefs that each has clung to over the years are revealed to have been illusions.

Some critics sees this as another anti-capitalist screed by the author, but the material goes deeper than that. It’s true that the pursuit of material gain has done Walter no good, and Victor does measure his stagnation against societal expectations, especially given his affluent childhood. But those seem more personal attributes than the fault of society. I’m not sure their struggles justify an upheaval of the system.

Henry Goodman runs away with the show as the Jewish furniture broker in a perfect Yiddish theater portrayal. I knew immigrant types like this way back when and found this extremely nostalgic, a picture of a lost world. (Goodman is 76 and was presumably familiar with such people as well.) He made every line count; the casual way he ate the hard boiled egg out of nowhere was hilarious. I’m not quite sure of the ending, where he sits alone in the spotlight and laughs uncontrollably at the comedy recording after all the drama that has preceded it, but it was a tremendous performance.

He was supported by a crack cast, with an especially impressive showing by Elliot Cowan as Victor. I was blown away by the scene where he’s forced to acknowledge that the tool of his own liberation, the harp, was sitting there in front of him the entire time. The harp, which he remembers his mother playing despite not recalling what she looked like, becomes not a symbol of beauty and culture but of his own impotence. Faye Castlelow was great as the wife, who swings between her husband (who has agreed to a price and wants to give his estranged brother his fair share) and her brother-in-law (who tells Victor that he’s selling too low) in line with which seems more lucrative at the moment, and John Hopkins gives a powerful rendering of Walter.

The stage is a properly claustrophobic clutter of objects, lit very evocatively. The theater, a relatively new place away from the West End, is small but nicely laid out. The quality of this production bodes well for its future.