The Price: Simon Delaney balances restraint with rage in the Gate’s assured staging of Arthur Miller’s play

The Price

Gate Theatre, Dublin

★★★☆☆

On the top floor of a condemned brownstone in 1960s New York, Victor Franz is trying to divest himself of his family’s furniture. His parents are dead, his only brother long estranged, and his wife is adamant that they turn a profit from the fusty furniture. Victor, a policeman who hasn’t won a battle in his life, is old enough to retire; the furniture is their inheritance, she urges him, their future. On Stuart Marshall’s set, piled high with old-fashioned armoires and outdated chairs, all this stuff is just a symbol: Chekhov’s loaded gun. It is the literal baggage that Victor must shed in order to move on with his life.

One of several delights in this assured production of Arthur Miller’s 1968 play is the intelligent dramatic construction, where character and theme emerge from tightly sculpted dialogue rather than from action. In the opening scene, the strained conversation between Victor and Esther establishes Miller’s preoccupations: the legacies of poverty and failure, the conflicting worldviews of personal agency and structure, the tensions of individual preservation and family duty. The arrival of Gregory Solomon, a furniture-dealing philosopher having an existential crisis of his own, adds a deeper layer of social commentary to the play, critiquing the soul sacrifices of the American dream, a theme that continues to resonate in our late-capitalist culture.

But that’s just the script: the characters are only mouthpieces without good actors to bring them to life. In the central role of Victor, Simon Delaney excels in a performance that balances restraint and rage, repressed resentment and paralysing fear. As his wife, the excellent Abigail McGibbon pushes Victor’s character and Delaney’s performance to its limits, though Miller is as dismissive of her character as Solomon is in the end.

As the antiques’ appraiser, Nicholas Woodeson brings an unpredictable comedy to the family drama, though Solomon’s bumbling bluster belies a deep wisdom. If the Franzes fail to understand why he keeps reflecting on the past, the audience doesn’t. When Victor’s brother, Walter, storms out, and Victor and Esther retreat to the escapist comforts of the cinema, Miller leaves us with an image of Solomon in the Franz apartment, reclined in an armchair, laughing. What else can you do in the face of life?

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Miller’s script specifies that the two acts of The Price should be run without an interval if possible; the inclusion of one in this production is a reminder why. Although Conleth Hill, the production’s director, handles the break between acts with stylish comedy, the actors – particularly Sean Campion, joining the stage as Walter at the end of the first half – have to work hard to recapture the dramatic tension. This feels like a significant misstep in what would otherwise be an almost perfect production.

The Price runs at the Gate Theatre, Dublin 1, until Saturday, June 3rd