At 76 Goodman is a little slighter and more silvery than when we last met in 2022 when he was playing Poirot in Chichester’s Murder on the Orient Express. The Belgian detective was his first stage role after falling into depression when it seemed Covid had shut down his career. Today that career no longer seems the priority it was, even though he still lands meaty TV roles, such as cabinet minister Singer in the dictatorship satire The Regime starring Kate Winslet.
These days when producers say to him, “I’ve got this new television series and there is a great role for you,” Goodman is not as interested as he used to be.
“I can’t even read it. There are some very big roles but I’d rather do something more holistic and more connected,” he says. He is getting more interested in meditation and “physical self-healing.”
Mental health is something that Goodman has been interested in ever since the age of ten, when his schizophrenic father was taken away from the family home in Whitechapel where he was born and raised, the youngest of six siblings including his twin. He never saw him again. The authorities wanted to put all the children in a care home but his mother, who did piecework late into the night, mostly sewing, and then worked at Grodzinski bakery during day, kept the family together.
As he grew up, the removal of his father from the family home got him thinking about definitions of mental health and madness, which in turn led to him reading about “transactional analysis” and the different parts of the personality. “The parent, the adult, the child,” he explains.
“It’s very Arthur Miller,” he adds, bringing the conversation back to his latest role and, for me, my exchange with the woman at the Young Vic. During the course of our short conversation she encapsulated more than three decades of Goodman’s illustrious theatre career during which the actor has received much acclaim and two Olivier awards. One was for his landmark Shylock at the National Theatre in 1999 and the other for his Charles Guiteau in Sondheim’s Assassins at the Donmar Warehouse.
His latest role as Solomon takes Goodman back to the “old Talmud Torah gabardine guys” in Whitechapel’s Christian Street who said to boys like Goodman “you learn your portion”.
“I wasn’t enamoured of them,” he says, dropping the old country Jewish accent. “It was medieval. Yet I realise they are like the parents of the brothers in this play [played by Elliot Cowan and John Hopkins] and like the old man Solomon. And also like my grandparents who escaped from Lithuania.”
Distinguished career: Goodman in The Price[Missing Credit]
In filling out Solomon’s backstory, Goodman has decided that Solomon also came from Lithuania before travelling through five countries including his final destination, New York.
“It almost feels like Solomon was written for Henry Goodman,” says director Jonathan Munby before that day’s rehearsal. “He fits Henry like a glove.”
Munby’s production will be the third major Miller revival in London over as many months including All My Sons starring Bryan Cranston in the West End and the aforementioned Broken Glass, a play wrought from Miller’s own Jewishness. There is also currently John Proctor is the Villain at the Royal Court, Kimberly Belflower’s fascinating reassessment of Miller’s The Crucible.
“Why do you think we need we need Miller?” asks Munby rhetorically. “Because he asks fundamental questions that society tries to avoid; questions about morality, social responsibility and identity. About choices that we make in the past and how they inform the present.”
The director is keenly aware that the play is being revived at a time of heightened antisemitism. Accordingly, Solomon’s relationship with money has to be dealt with carefully. There is a scene where the old man feels unwell and one of the brothers – a doctor – takes Solomon’s pulse. In the stage direction Solomon mistakenly thinks the doctor is reaching for the cash in the furniture dealer’s hand instead of his wrist and withdraws it.
“I’m really aware that this is the story of a survivor, of an immigrant who is 89 and who has met four economic crashes and survived them all,” says Munby.
As the director says, Solomon may fit Goodman like a glove, but that also speaks to the sheer diversity of the actor. His Richard III (for the Royal Shakespeare Company) was as murderous as his Arturo Ui, the villain in Brecht’s warning about fascism. His Billy Flynn in Chicago was so smooth you could ski down him. All were acclaimed, except the ill-fated turn as Bialystock in The Producers. Mel Brooks famously sacked him over “artistic differences”.
Of all these villains, Roy Cohn, from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, remains among the most vivid for the actor. I attempt to make him choose a favourite. After all, it might be time to ask if this is Goodman’s swansong stage performance?
“There is a play by Chekhov called Swansong in which an actor lives on past glories. There’s a part of me that just doesn’t want to do that,” says Goodman.
You don’t want to choose one, I ask. Not even his 1930s-set Shylock, said to be the best there ever was by none other than the late Sir Antony Sher?
“Difficult to say. As a Jewish person I was very wary of playing Shylock and trying to make people feel sorry for him. I didn’t set out to do that. I wanted to show what antisemitism or racism of any kind does to a person. That’s why I put in a bit of Yiddish and was quite nasty to my daughter, rather than romanticising the role. I’m proud of its success, yes, but I don’t think that was the pinnacle of my existence. I just don’t.”
Then unexpectedly he recalls a performance when he was just 22 and fresh out of Rada. “I was at the Munich Olympic Games. I was in a street theatre group, a kind of cultural Olympics. After the massacre of Israeli athletes we were asked to stay on and we played to literally thousands of people on the streets as a kind of healing process to the trauma. That was as important to me as anything.”
The Price is at Marylebone Theatre until June 7
