London has been in the grip of an Arthur Miller revival of late. Hot on the heels of an Olivier Award-winning All My Sons and a recent Broken Glass at the Young Vic, the Marylebone Theatre now turns its attention to one of the playwright’s rarely produced works, The Price. First staged in 1967, it rarely gets the attention lavished on Death of a Salesman or The Crucible and possibly the reason is that it’s a play of two very differing halves.

The premise is deceptively simple. Two brothers — Victor, a quietly resigned police officer, and Walter, a successful surgeon — reconvene in the cluttered New York attic of their late father to sell off his belongings. What begins as a mundane exercise in clearing houses rapidly becomes a fierce excavation of decades of resentment, sacrifice, guilt, and self-deception. Miller’s writing, as ever, lies in the way domestic ordinariness becomes the vessel for the most profound questions: what is a life worth? Can a person ever know whether the choices they made were the right ones?

Central to that success of this production is Jon Bausor’s remarkable set design. Set in an enormous attic, it has a vaulted ceiling that reaches up into the top of the space and it’s so densely and authentically packed with period furniture that you find yourself spending the first minutes simply absorbing it – it looks like Bausor has raided every antique shop and repository in London. There is a cloying claustrophobia to the space, as though the weight of the past has become physically present. Max Pappenheim’s sound design adds a further cinematic dimension, lending atmosphere without overwhelming.

And then there is Henry Goodman. The two-time Olivier Award winner plays Gregory Solomon, the eccentric 89-year-old furniture dealer brought in to put a price on the family’s possessions. Goodman is simply a force of nature in the role. He is mischievous, warmly comic, and unexpectedly moving — a figure of improbable vitality who also, beneath the bluster, turns out to be the production’s moral compass. His Solomon is the one character with the wisdom to see all the arguments clearly, and Goodman calibrates every moment of humour and pathos perfectly. His bit of business with a boiled egg is mesmerising and his speech about the fact that modern furniture isn’t meant to last and shopping has taken over, is incredibly contemporary for a play written in the sixties.

The supporting cast are excellent. Elliot Cowan’s Victor is a man of quiet dignity slowly coming undone; his internal unravelling is movingly rendered. Faye Castelow brings brittle anxiety to Esther, Victor’s wife, whose worries about money and status cut to the heart of the play’s broader themes. John Hopkins completes the quartet as Walter with appropriately coiled tension.

The problem with The Price is that Goodman is hardly in act two, and most of it consists of the two brothers arguing about the past and their difficult relationship with their father and each other. It never really goes anywhere, and after the energy and humour given to act one by Goodman, it flags in pace and, at times, bores as the argument goes round in circles.

What is beyond dispute is that the Marylebone Theatre has once again delivered a production of remarkable quality even if the play itself is uneven. The Price, it turns out, is probably worth paying even if it’s just for Goodman’s performance alone.

Reviewed by Alan Fitter.

Three Stars.

https://www.marylebonetheatre.com/productions/the-price