If at the age of 76 this is Henry Goodman’s swansong stage performance, he is going out on a high.
Not that the two-time Olivier-winning actor – one for his landmark Shylock and the other for one of Sondheim’s Assassins - has made any such announcement. But he has admitted to these days being interested in slowing down rather throwing his energy into stage work.
Yet energy and a good deal of comic timing is exactly what Goodman brings to Arthur Miller’s sibling running-sore of a play of 1968. He plays 89-year-old furniture dealer Gregory Solomon who has been brought out of retirement by a random telephone enquiry by New York cop Victor Franz (Elliot Cowan) who needs to sell his late father’s belongings.
“That phone book must have been old,” Solomon tells his first customer in years.
All the action takes place in the attic of a once-grand, now condemned New York townhouse where the objects are stored. In Jon Bauser’s design, watery twilight filters through two skylights onto a landscape of quality furniture and artefacts bought by Victor’s late father before he lost his wealth in the Crash of 1929.
Centre stage in Jonathan Munby’s sure-footed production is the armchair in which the father sat as a fearful, penniless, humiliated widow. Victor sacrificed his studies to become a scientist to look his father. By contrast his brother Walter left the family to continue his education. Decades later no water has passed under the bridge.
Much of this backstory is established as Victor – still in uniform after a day on the beat - and his wife Esther (Faye Castelow) survey the objects up for sale. They need money, she reminds him.
More history emerges when Solomon arrives short of breath and with a similar gag (about the attic being close to heaven) to one that appears in Neil Simon’s garret-set Barefoot in the Park, which opened on Broadway five years before the premiere of Miller’s play. Coincidence?
Goodman’s old man has a European accent, drops the occasional ‘oi’ here and ‘vey’ there, and one-liners that could grace the Borscht Belt.
The play is more contained than the works considered to be Miller’s masterpieces: Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge and All Our Sons. Yet the structure is nothing if not masterful and as always with Miller truths established early on in the play are revealed to be long-held distortions and falsehoods.
In a powerfully acted evening Cowan’s tall, confident Victor visibly shrinks with the unexpected arrival of the brother he blames for his own wasted life. As Walter, Hopkins (who was recently a shockingly uncanny Jeffrey Epstein opposite Michael Sheen’s Prince Andrew in A Very Royal Scandal) is also excellent. The confidence his brother lacks is transmitted with in every sentence and gesture. That Castelow matches the potency of these performances in a role that orbits the men is no mean feat and deserves a best supporting role gong.
If I have a gripe it is that the opening in which Victor explores the attic in darkness by torchlight is serenaded by needless incidental music that dilutes the tension rather than enhances it. And Goodman? What a loss it would be if this show were his last.
The Price is at Marylebone Theatre, London
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