Writer: Arthur Miller
Director: Jonathan Munby
The Price is perhaps one of Arthur Miller’s most straightforward plays. Victor Franz (Elliot Cowan), a 50-year-old New York cop facing retirement, is forced to divest an attic room full of his family’s antique furniture because the building in which the collection is housed is to be demolished. And so he invites a furniture dealer, Henry Goodman’s Gregory Solomon, to assess and hopefully purchase all the properties.
Despite a rather sleazy attitude to Victor’s wife, Esther (Faye Castelow), that would seem out of place even in the 1960s when this play was first performed, Solomon is delightful as he sweet-talks Cowan’s character into a low price. Despite his protestations that he brought an ethical stance to the practice of assaying, Goodman delivers every line with such a twinkle that he can’t help but seem like an octogenarian Del Boy, talking all the furniture down in order to justify lowballing his offer.
Cowan and Goodman’s interplay takes up the majority of the first act, a gentle and meandering piece of whimsy. Cowan’s portrayal hints at a man whose life did not take the path he originally intended, but is happy to leave the past well alone. But that falls by the wayside when his estranged brother, Walter (John Hopkins), turns up, meeting his sibling face-to-face for the first time in 16 years.
Act II sees Solomon sidelined – literally shoved into a bedroom off the attic with nothing but a Hershey bar for company – as the brothers vacillate between attempting to make up and tearing strips off one another. Their different relationships with their manipulative father and their differing recollections of childhood events are stoked by both the power differential – Walter left to become a successful doctor, leaving Victor to care for his father – and by Esther’s interjections, as she often seems to defend her brother-in-law to her husband.
The tension in this second act makes it more of a thrill to witness than the more humorous Act I. Hopkins lends Walter an air of a man who outwardly projects success, but has a messy personal life (he is newly divorced, rarely sees his grown-up children, and had a three-year-long breakdown). Cowan provides a sharp contrast as a man who had a steady, largely uneventful life (in a 25-year career in the NYPD, he seems to have rarely arrested anyone) that was not unhappy and may indeed have been much better than the life he had while caring for his father.
The way each brother circles the other, only one an outward alpha male but both fiercely defensive, feels like it is lent more weight by the performances and Jonathan Mundy’s direction than Miller’s script really deserves. Some revelations that come in the play’s climactic moment feel like they could, and should, be more attached to what else has gone before.
That said, the intra-familial psychological warfare the brothers inflict on each other is simultaneously entertaining and emotionally draining, especially as it becomes clear that each sibling has not been honest with themselves, much less each other. The Price cannot help but feel like a lesser Miller play, but for all its lop-sided narrative, it remains a fascinating work.
Runs until 7 June 2026
