The Price is right

What a devastating, emotional charge Arthur Miller generates in his 1969 drama of family relations, with two estranged brothers who come furious face to face and heart to heart in their long-dead father's Manhattan apartment.

Jealousy, resentment and guilt, vital ingredients without which any play about a malfunctioning family would be incomplete, duly erupt in The Price's astonishing final scenes. Skeletons and home-truths duly tumble from the closets where the best family secrets are supposed to be locked until the involved parties are safely dead.

Sean Holmes's masterfully organised production, premiered at the Tricycle theatre, rises to a pitch of authentic fury and grief that makes almost every other West End play seem emotionally stunted by comparison.

Larry Lamb, magnificent as Victor, a lowly policeman who at almost 50 looks back upon his life as a long waste of time and lost opportunity, seems to make the Apollo resound with his outburst of rage and distress. His rich surgeon brother Walter (Des McAleer), who provokes this spectacular losing of temper, and Sian Thomas as his soured, neurotic wife, Esther, watch in consternation. Warren Mitchell, who gives the loveliest performance of a lifetime as the 89-year-old secondhand furniture dealer, Solomon, looking for a last, good deal, imparts delectable comedy and pathos. He shuffles, staggers and schemes his way into Victor's confidence. He wheedles in a Russian-Yiddish accent to the manner reborn.

Truth, the concealed, often unbearable reality, figuring as the end-game to which many Ibsen and Miller plays are driven, is the destination in The Price. The rare excitement of this traditional, wellmade play, lies in the way Miller lets us gradually appreciate how the grim economic circumstances of the 1929 Wall Street crash, paternal guile and the brothers' differing reaction to family blackmail have been the making or unmaking of them. The cause of the brothers' meeting is the need to dispose of their father's effects. For the building, which houses these ghostly items, is set to be razed to the ground.

Anthony Lamble's wonderful set, which makes the apartment resemble a junk and antiques emporium, breathes an air of melancholia and decay. And that mood is accentuated by Victor and Esther. Lamb's sturdy policeman never had the money for university and looked after his financially stricken father instead. Into this place of memories and regrets there comes his smug brother, offering charity and dispensing patronage from a great height. The past is set to spring its trap, Miller then reveals to rivetting effect, that nothing about the brothers is quite what it seems.

The playwright's exhilarating thesis is to suggest that everyone has a life-choice, needs courage to take it and always pays some sort of price for so doing: both Victor and Walter, whose marriage collapsed soon after a nervous breakdown, have been the prime though not sole authors of their lives. Lamb blazes a vintage emotional trail as he charts Victor's journey from ignorance to understanding. McAleer wears the role of Walter as if it were an uncomfortable fit. But Mitchell's manipulative Solomon, with a woozy eye on the main chance, is an exquisite comic creation. The Price is a serious dazzler.

The Price