The Price

Any production of The Price, suitably enough for a play with such a title, will hinge on balance—between the Franz brothers, Victor and Walter; between two ways of viewing the world; and between our attitudes toward Esther and Solomon. If we are being prodded toward one side or the other, the ambivalent nature of the work is lost, and we are into the realms of a thesis play. While Arthur Miller was considered out of step with social and cultural currents by the late 1960s when the play was first produced, he was not working in the same mode as he had in the 1940s and 1950s. Admittedly, he largely refused to integrate contemporary theatrical or cultural influences into the play, but his attitude to his work was sharply different from that of his early plays. All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), and The Crucible (1953) had definitive points that were driven home with the zeal of a true believer, intent on expressing his opposition to prevailing cultural forces and ideas. The Price is an altogether different animal, and it takes a deft hand to ensure that it retains its power to pull the audiences from one perspective to another. This production of The Price at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, coming less than a decade after its last outing there in 2014, achieves this with poise and comfort, as the temptation to side exclusively with Victor, who could be one of the theater’s great pitiful losers, is avoided. Director Conleth Hill largely maintains a light touch, which accords with what he told Sara Keating of the Irish Times are his rules for directing: “Never be dictatorial. You should be nudging, rather than demanding. Everybody works in different ways, different paces, different methods. Keep a loose rein so you can discover things as you go. Stay open, and keep the work day short” (Keating). The approach has certainly reaped rewards here, but the lack of innovation or revelation means that it is occasionally an excessively comfortable experience—admirable in its construction, the production does not add a great deal to those already familiar with the work.The set is inevitably one of the most anticipated elements of any production of The Price, and Stuart Marshall’s work here is deeply effective. Furniture is piled along the back wall, with several oversized armchairs toward the front. In the program, and repeated on the Gate Theatre website, Marshall said the work of Edward Hopper was one of his main influences and wrote that his “enigmatic interiors from an earlier era often show isolated characters mid-scene as if glimpsed through a window or seen on a stage” (Marshall). Intriguingly, a tower of the Franz’s junk is placed slightly upstage of center, allowing actors to walk behind it and obscure themselves from the audience. This is of course a perfect metaphor for the family situation in the play, as neither of the brothers can bear to be fully revealed; the impulse to obscure their own feelings and desires was taught to them by their unhappy parents, and it has maintained into middle age. The grubbiness of the home lab that Victor and Walter each reminisce over is well presented, complete with the mark on the wall ceiling where an experiment once went wrong. The sense of the accumulation of time, of stepping into the past, is therefore achieved with ease, as we are in no doubt that this is barely even the “present” of 1960s New York, but, to these characters, almost a dreamworld in which the brothers’ childhood is more real and alive than anything that has happened in the intervening years.That Miller dictates that it is set in such a particular time and place, however, does cause issues with this production, and it is tempting to wonder whether it would be best served by taking it out of this most explicit context. The Price is an inherently personal play, despite what Miller claimed, reflecting as it does a good degree of his relationship with his brother, Kermit, and their parents. While Walter is not an exact double for Arthur and Victor is not entirely Kermit, there are parallels in history and character that are well known and do not require restating here. The play, then, most certainly takes place in 1960s New York, in the shadow of the Great Depression; but over fifty years on from its original production, and thousands of miles from New York, is it not worth considering that the play be removed from these shackles and rerouted to a more relevant time and/or place? Miller claimed in Timebends that the play related to the Vietnam War, writing later that as “the corpses piled up, it became cruelly impolite if not unpatriotic to suggest the obvious, that we were fighting the past” (485), as indeed are Victor and Walter. This has always read like rationalizing after the fact, but is something on which the Gate doubles down, as Caoilinn Hughes records uncritically in the program that Miller “pinned the impetus for [The Price] on the war in Vietnam” (Hughes). It is certain that more than a few theatergoers found this bemusing across the run, as it does not come across in either the script or the production. The decision to include this is possibly an attempt to keep Miller in his appointed role, as critic and moral voice of America, while refusing to allow his work to attain a freshness or relevance to a different world. Ireland, in particular Dublin, is currently enduring staggering twin crises of housing and homelessness—this contemplative piece, set after all in a building that is about to be condemned but first must be excavated to find the source of mutual dissatisfaction, could quite easily be fashioned to speak to this particular moment. This is where Hill’s reluctance to dictate and force himself onto the work is to be lamented.The cast all put in admirable performances here, as any concerns about what the production isn’t are swept away by what this most certainly is—a fine production of a fine work that brutally exposes the self-fashioning of personal history to which all of us are prone. Martin Gottfried commented that this “is not a well-made play. It does not tell a story, nobody changes in it, wins or loses” (394, author’s italics), and he was of course correct. This then requires actors to perform with a certain desperation, a lamentation at the state of their lives both at the beginning and at the end. There is no crescendo, as the departure of Walter is not a moment of great emotional weight—it is the logical and inevitable outcome of a process that begins the instant Victor refuses his idea to write off the used furniture as a charitable donation. The characters do not alter their situation and are really no worse or better off at the end. Hope for a major life change has been extinguished, but there was also very little of it to begin with. Abigail McGibbon as Esther is the star in this sense, as she expertly communicates the desperation for comfort, or at least hope, that Miller gives her. While her role dwindles as it seems that Miller lost interest in developing her, McGibbon’s performance is strong enough that she dominates even when forced to retreat into the background, and let the brothers share their recriminations. She plays the role not as a harpy seeking to dominate Victor, as there may be an invitation to do so, but rather as a lover who has tried to make Victor the best version of himself, only for him to refuse at each turn. That he will turn down Walter’s offer to suddenly put thousands of dollars in their pockets is mystifying to her, and she interprets this as him cruelly forcing her to pay for his father’s sins. Playing Victor, Simon Delaney is generally assured, but at his worst can also come across as a sad sack—his posing and fencing with the foil of his youth is unconvincing, and it may be that with his dark hair and squat, burly physique, he simply looks too much like an NYPD cop. Best known in Ireland and the United Kingdom for comedic roles in film and television, Delaney portrays Victor as irritable and insecure, as he should be, but there is very little sense of his other life—“science” is spoken about as if it is a mystical ideal that he had once heard of but never knew much about.Solomon is of course the star as far as characters are concerned, and any production would be foolish to ignore one of Miller’s finest creations. He is as cartoonish and expressive as one could hope for, but his moments of sincerity carry true weight. Whether ruminating on his daughter’s suicide or explaining frankly why there is no longer a market for the apartment’s old furniture, Nicholas Woodeson’s performance is as intense and truthful as it is when he is getting his biggest laughs, as for example with “[t]here wouldn’t be a little salt?” The relationship between Victor and Solomon is key, but unfortunately is a point of weakness, as Delaney is too keen to believe him, too easily taken in. Solomon is played with a more devious tinge than is strictly required, as the production directs us to think that he is scamming Victor out of the appropriate value of his family’s old property. This is of course an ambiguity that is built into the play, but here it feels excessively blatant—it is difficult to feel much sympathy for someone who is so clearly making a rube of Victor. Solomon bursts up the stairs and onto the stage with bulging eyeballs and gasping for air, almost like a Marx Brothers creation, but it soon becomes clear that this is part of an elaborate hoax. The conclusion feels more like Solomon laughing at Victor for being such an easy mark, rather than what could be a somber rumination on the absurdity of life. Woodeson’s performance is all that it needs to be, but this deliberate reorientation of a character for whom we should be feeling more fondness is an unnecessary step in a cynical direction.On the contrary, Sean Campion’s performance as Walter is precisely what is called for. He appears sincere, broken, and regretful, but is pushed to the edge and then off it by Walter’s obtrusiveness. He has the required slickness that means we distrust him as much as Victor does, but then complicates and builds on this when detailing the end of his marriage, his lack of friendship, and how his priorities have changed over time. His offer of scientific work to Victor is not entirely believable, but it probably shouldn’t be—as Miller told Matthew C. Roudané, it’s “a play without any candy” (qtd. in Balakian 136), so no act or gesture should be considered entirely sincere and heartfelt. In the same way that he essentially accuses Victor of being a moral blackmailer (a phrase borrowed from The Archbishop’s Ceiling, said by Marcus to Sigmund), we cannot think it impossible that he is attempting to pay for his guilt by getting Victor a new job in a field for which he apparently had such passion. Indeed, his ferocity comes out when telling Victor that their father had money stashed away and that he was free to take the opportunities that Walter did not have to think twice about. Victor is almost visibly deflated at this point, and it is a moment that contains real weight. Having glimpsed the possibility of understanding and retaliating against what he perceived his brother did to him, Victor is now limp, lifeless—his justification for his life has vanished, and he lashes out. This is where Delaney’s performance peaks, as he portrays a man unable to integrate a new truth into his life story.It is likely that any version of The Price will run into some of the problems listed above, and minor as they are, they should not obscure what was an excellent evening at the theater. The way in which sympathy and mistrust were wrenched from brother to brother and back again in the second act is masterful and reflective of a director who knew that he has wonderful material that speaks for itself. The play does not propose to answer any questions or forgive or blame anyone for the situation presented—instead, it presents four people that are disappointed with their lives and would dearly love to find out how they got there. The Price shows Miller’s vast gift for presenting and exploring the psyches of people who are pulled out of a comfortable narrative of their lives and the impact of this destabilization on every aspect of their being. This production, notwithstanding the direction of Solomon, expertly depicted the tensions and frustrations that preoccupy the play.