Arthur Miller is one of the great international playwrights, a status continually reaffirmed by the revival of plays such as "The Price". His work simultaneously engages the intellect and assaults the emotions, often ending in a rare catharsis.
The Price
Gate Theatre, Dublin
Gerry Colgan
Here a New York cop enters a room full of furniture and junk on the top floor of an old building where his family once lived. He cared for his father after the latter lost his business in the Wall Street Crash, and forfeited a career of his own to do it. His brother Walter got out, to become a successful surgeon, and has not been in touch for many years. Now the building is due for demolition, and Victor is there to sell whatever he can. His wife Esther joins him.
The putative purchaser, 89-year old Gregory Solomon, soon arrives, and a fascinating game of bargaining begins. Victor is a man who cannot comprehend his own life, and finds it impossible to know the importance or value of anything. Esther loves him, but she would like a better life, including more money. Solomon has in fact retired, but is drawn one more time by the thrill of the game.
Then comes Walter, smiling and expensive-looking, seeking to mend fences.
As the veneer wears off, it emerges that he has been divorced, has had a three-year breakdown and has lived in fear - of his own ambition, of failure, of an unstable marriage. He selfishly wants to help Victor, who senses that the price would be that of his soul. The conflict between the two is electric and searing, stripping each to his psychological core.
This is a brilliant production of a classic modern play, with acting of the highest calibre. Robert Prosky's Solomon is a marvellous creation, Lorcan Cranitch is wholly convincing as the confused but principled Victor, Ger Ryan lives the role of Esther and Nick Dunning gets to the heart of Walter's complexities. Joe Vanek's design and Mark Brokaw's direction harmonises it all to provide a rare theatrical experience.
Stephen Petronio Dance Company
O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin
Michael Seaver
The cultivated bad-boy image is gone but the titles of his dances - Broken Man, City of Twist and The Island of Misfit Toys - hint that the weird and seedy are still fundamental to Stephen Petronio. Two movements of his Gothic Suite featured in this performance and as he sat, smoked and watched the opening of The Island of Misfit Toys, there was little doubt that this is his inner world. But, while the post-9/11 City of Twists may be understandably weighed by gravitas and anger, in a week when brutalised naked bodies are appearing daily on our televisions and newspapers the big bad world depicted in the images of The Island of Misfit Toys seem almost quaintly adolescent.
Petronio isn't known for his radical choreographic structures. It's his movement, all fast and aggressive in a New York kind of way, that holds the eye. Still showing traces of his seven years dancing with Trisha Brown, he has retained her fluency and illogicality but disturbed the momentum, creating a more edgy and less predictable vocabulary. The work is also very New York in the fact that the dancers are stunningly good, devouring choreography that zips along unrelentingly. Stillness seems unconscionable and even transitions between individual sections are rushed as if caught in the slipstream of the dance.
In Broken Man, Petronio, dancing solo, is already off-centre in a jacket that is on one shoulder and off the other. The movement magnifies this misshape with the focus on the inner impulses affecting outside form so it's the man that is broken rather than the body. The broken individuals in City of Twists remain within their own sensory environment not relating to each other until towards the end with lifts and mutual support, and the metaphor is carried into the final piece with its outsize faceless deformed dolls. But although the works are young they all feel dated and jaded, the fashioned costumes no longer cutting edge and even Laurie Anderson's disjointed music sounding like musical channel-hopping. As Petronio mellows and audience becomes desensitised, the artist's inner world and our real world seem to be drifting apart.
