The brothers grim

In 1968, Arthur Miller took a room full of old junk, and used the memories hidden in its dust to create an extraordinary emotional battleground between two brothers. Set 16 years after the great Wall Street Crash, The Price shows Victor and Walter struggling with finance, guilt and personal dreams among the tables and closets, and reflects the hysterical fragility of the war-shaken mid-Forties by darkly revealing how each brother is shaped by his delusions as much as his beliefs.

Miller has always superbly illustrated the different nuances of illusion at its most destructive in the capitalist psyche, and at the start of the 21st century, this work has lost none of its tortured complexity. In the hands of director Sean Holmes, it is revealed with thrilling clarity how the playwright's exquisite naturalism at its best brings the disturbing potency of a Greek tragedy to modern-day dilemmas.

Anthony Lamble's design seems to invite audience members to go and rummage among the armoires, chiffoniers, bits of radio, chandeliers, harp, gramophone, and other household possessions stacked on stage. Larry Lamb's life-weary Victor is the first character who strides into the room, which, it emerges, is full of family heirlooms up for sale because they are situated in a building awaiting demolishment.

His wife, Esther, played with angular liveliness by Sian Thomas, is desperate for him to retire early from being a policeman, so that he can pursue his dream and follow his vocation as a scientist. Money to be made from the furniture sale taps into her simultaneous wish for a more moneyed lifestyle: the shadow of Victor's alienated brother - a wealthy surgeon, and joint owner - lies heavily on their fraught plans for a new future.

The play's central dynamic is kicked off by an ancient Jew who has come to buy the furniture, comically and shambolically incarnated by Warren Mitchell. In an interview, Miller once said that Solomon was one of his favourite characters, and Mitchell's performance thrives entertainingly on the amiable deceptiveness and the scene-stealingly skewed wisdom of the man who highlights essential truths in Victor's character at the same time as he tries to con him.

Lamb and Des McAleer (Walter) sustain the compelling psychological ambiguity of two men scarred in different ways by their father's emotional and apparent financial ruin in 1929. Victor's paralysis in the face of fulfilment makes him a fascinatingly flawed antithesis to the relentless can-do philosophy of capitalist culture.

The Price is showing at the Tricycle, NW6, until 7 December. Box office: 020 7328 1000.

The Price