You might be forgiven for thinking that 2026 is Arthur Miller’s year. His play All My Sons has just closed after a sell-out run at Wyndham’s Theatre; the National Theatre has announced a new production of Miller’s seminal work Death of A Salesman, and sandwiched between is the Young Vic’s Broken Glass, which closes on 18 April. But lest deprived Miller fans should feel deprived, The Price opens on 17 April at the Marylebone Theatre.
When we met, Jonathan Munby, The Price’s director, was very excited to begin rehearsals. For, as he explained, he believes the role of Gregory Solomon, the 89-year-old antiques dealer in this four-character play, could have been written for its star, Henry Goodman. “It fits him completely – he is the most perfect actor for the role,” Munby enthused. (Previous actors in the part have included Danny de Vito and David Suchet.)
The play, written in 1968, is a drama, sometimes darkly comic, and sometimes just plain dark, about estranged brothers Victor and Walter Franz. They meet, after 16 years apart, in the attic of their childhood home, where they have come together to sell family furniture.
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On hand to conduct the sale is Gregory Solomon, by turns jibing at the brothers and offering philosophical advice on the choices that they have made in life. Victor, a police sergeant, gave up the possibility of further education in order to support their father, while Walter became a successful and wealthy surgeon. Plenty of guilt to tangle with there, not least the different memories the two brothers have of how each made their personal decisions.
When it turns out that her late father-in-law was not as destitute as Victor believed, meaning he need not have sacrificed his education opportunities, his deeply dissatisfied wife Esther is not a happy woman.
Jonathan Munby, an award-winning director, has been familiar with The Price for many years since seeing it in the West End. “I think plays about fathers and sons tend to stay with you — particularly if you’ve had a complicated relationship with your own father. But it’s also a play which requires an extraordinary actor at the centre of it, and I think the play lies in wait for that actor.
“I had been doing some work with Henry on another play at the Marylebone and I realised that the role of Gregory Solomon could have been written for him. So the play, which had been in my consciousness for a while, and then meeting and working with Henry, collided at the same time as the Marylebone offered me a slot to do a production there”.
The Price is not only about fathers and sons, says Munby. “It’s also about social responsibility, about the past and the cost of the past, about the cost of choices we made in the past and how they relate to our present.” Though Miller wrote the play in 1968 and intended it to relate to the Vietnam war, Munby thinks of The Price as a metaphor for our own lives post-Covid and post-lockdown: “It’s a clash between self-interest and sacrifice.”
Munby recalls that Elia Kazan, the Hollywood director and one-time close collaborator with Miller, had observed that Miller’s plays “are not written, they are built”. Munby “completely agrees” with that view. “Once you start to work on one of his plays, you feel his presence so strongly. The sense of the drama being so well-crafted, it’s extraordinary to work inside it.”
The Price is “absolutely a Jewish-centred story,” believes Munby. “Gregory Solomon is a Jewish immigrant finding his way through life and surviving. He’s an extraordinary man, who’s had many lives in one. He’s 89 by the time we meet him in the play. He’s been in the British Navy. He was an acrobat. He finds his way to New York and ends up as a furniture salesman and dealer. His identity, his heritage, and his struggle to survive are very much part of who he is. And that balanced with the Franzes, whom I believe are Jewish, and who I sense are very much a reflection of Miller’s own family story.”
Munby has a fascinating plan to engage playgoers who may never have seen The Price. “We are going to stage this production in the auditorium, to envelop the audience, and bring them inside it.”
He’s keen for the play to be held up as a mirror to the audience’s own concerns, noting that the “freshness” which speaks to him means that The Price, with its conundrums and questions of conscience, “means that it could have been written yesterday. And the other funny thing is that in today’s post-truth age, it’s also a play about truth. Miller makes a very strong case for the power of truth, and I find that incredibly important.”
In some ways, Munby says, the play is Miller’s response to war. “That is to say he writes about the morality around choices that we make, the burden of moral decisions, how people justify the lives that they live and the choices that they make. We are now in a state of war, and I think an audience will see an interesting reflection there.
“In terms of the rise in antisemitism, which is so appalling to me, I’m hoping that this production will not show these characters in a negative light. One has to be really careful about the portrayal of Jewish characters, and we’re going to be very sensitive to any sense of cliché or stereotype and present the truth of who these human beings are in the context of their lives”.
Munby reminds me that Arthur Miller himself directed the first production of The Price, after the original director left. “He wrote a note for future directors that it was very important that the audience should feel sympathy for both brothers. And that’s very important to me, and to my work. I like to present characters with all of their facets on show.” All of the four people we see “are fallible and have all made questionable choices in their lives” — as have we, in the audience, in the dark.
The Price is at the Marylebone Theatre from 17 April to 7 June. marylebonetheatre.com
Source:
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