“a superb four-hander for a deep wound both in family and in capitalism”
In a way, Arthur Miller’s The Price revolves around one simple question: is the police officer in uniform a projection of your father as the archetype, or it is, in fact, the other way round?
If you incline towards the former, you are potentially siding with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, those psychoanalytic thinkers who, by the 1960s, had turned the world into a familial psychic drama of daddy-mummy-me, where everyone becomes a traumatised subject because the father deprives them of what they imagine should be theirs.
If you side with the latter, then welcome to the Marxists’ club: the father is actually a projection of the police officer, produced by a capitalist social order that requires subjects to be organised by that sense deprivation, fear, and perhaps guilt. Those psychoanalysts fail to see the socio-economic and cultural context.
Even though there is no evidence that Arthur Miller was consciously aware of this philosophical and intellectual fault line, living in the United States of the 1960s, amid hyper-developed capitalism and the growing influence of psychoanalysis, he could still acutely capture that tension and present it in The Price. This new revival at the Marylebone Theatre, directed by Jonathan Munby, is a lightly directorial handed production that weightlessly allows Miller’s reckonings to emerge with a remarkable cast of four.
Henry Goodman’s Gregory Solomon is perhaps the production’s greatest pleasure. While Solomon can easily be reduced to comic relief, Goodman’s rendition is indeed tragicomic, overtly theatrical, at times almost excessive, which feels entirely right here. He is, after all, the ultimate embodiment of capitalism itself that monetises everything.
As Victor, Elliot Cowan no doubt is the play’s emotional and ideological anchor of the evening. Victor’s tragedy doesn’t really sit within his father alone, but as a deeply oedipalised son. His selfhood is entirely built through negation. Self-scarification is internally weaponised for him to morally hijack others and only through that way he can make sense of himself.
Cowan successfully captures this distorted sadness and ressentiment in every precision of his body language and facial expression, presenting this middle-aged policeman a perfect product of 1960s American capitalism. John Hopkins’s Walter, in that sense, presents the opposite. While many readings tend to see him as charming at surface but beguiling in nature, this Walter is simply a man who does not allow his rage and sorrow to curdle into ressentiment. Similarly, although Ester is a smaller part in the play, but Faye Castelow brilliantly turns this role into another living evidence of Victor’s twisted selfhood. She is the true victim here who does not victimise herself.