The Price

Saw this with Warren Mitchell. Can't remember thinking at the time this was one of Miller's best.

Latest pricing scam: TWO sets of premium tickets! I imagine the long-term plan is to eventually make all stalls and good circle seats "premium".

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the free market, and charging what the market will (Burly) bear, but all I want is honesty.

If large numbers of premium seats go on sale on the first day of booking, then I would argue that they are neither limited*, in the generally accepted sense of the word, nor previously held, unless by previously they mean pre Book of Mormon.

* I appreciate all theatres have a limited number of seats, but I mean small in number.

I'm hoping to see this & think Adrian Lukis is strangely under-rated & should be better known.

Its long!!

Bloke next to me had the right idea and fell asleep through most of it.

Think this could have had a good 20-30 mins knocked off and be much better for it. Quite a slow builder in the first half with David Suchet doing all the comedy legwork.

Second half comes along and it all escalates and we sort of just lose David. The warring brothers keep on digging in and it all gets a bit confusing with all the different revelations.

Not a terrible play at all, just a bit too much for me tonight.

 

Same! Although they were all gone by 12:15 unfortunately.

Saw the matinee today. Third production ive seen. Really good. Suchet steals it of course but then it is that kind of part. Great set too. Recommended.

A strange play. Two brothers, Vic and Walter, meet again after 16 years in the shambles of their late father's home and explosively confront the issues that have kept them apart for so long - and yet the focus of the piece is grabbed, from his first entrance, by the quirky old furniture dealer, Solomon, who has come to appraise the stock, so to speak. What was Arthur Miller's reasoning?

It's a play clearly based on Miller's own family, a play with deep personal resonances for him, yet he deliberately leavens the intensity of the drama with an outsider, an essentially comic character, so wonderfully wrought that he was bound to steal the show. It reminds me of another work from the same period - the 60s - also dredged from Miller's own life, After The Fall, a play about Marilyn Monroe which never quite comes to grip with its subject, as if it is too painful to deal with head on.

But having noted that, The Price, for all its structural unorthodoxy, is a much better play than After the Fall and, in fact, works. The clash of brothers, confined to the second act, is brilliantly handled and fiercely written while the long first act setup, the Solomon show, is entertaining and ultimately meaningful - the appraiser's bargaining for his price metaphorically reflective of the brothers' situation.  

Solomon is, of course, played here by David Suchet and he takes every advantage of the gift of a role he has been given - a consummate performance. But kudos too to Brendan Coyle as Vic, the unsuccessful brother, who never leaves the stage and is, in fact, the lead in the play. Coyle is strong and characterful throughout in both the light and heavy moments and deserves much of the credit for the show's success.

And this production is a success, without a doubt. Under Jonathan Church's solid direction Miller's structural instincts for the piece are proven to be correct. Well done to all.

Welcome back, good to see you again :-)

Thanks for sharing. After seeing Suchet prowling the stage in that Pinter play last year, I had I wanted to see this, and now I have data to make that happen!

Having missed previous productions of this Miller play, I was curious to see The Price earlier this week. I thought it was well-acted, but a bit over-long (the second act is very talky) and, without wanting to sound uncharitable, I am slightly baffled by Adrian Lukis's Olivier nomination...

Saw this on Monday evening, Brendan Coyle was also off then but as above I thought the understudy was very good. Overall, although I’m usually a fan of Arthur Miller’s work, I don’t think this is anywhere near his strongest play, it did begin to drag a bit, especially after the interval. There are some good performance, especially from David Suchet, and I was a fan of the set design, but I feel this might have been a little bit overrated by critics.

After watching the matinee performance this afternoon, Brendan Coyle was absent (much to the annoyance of the lady I was talking to during the interval, though she was happy that David Suchet was on stage). I have mixed feelings about this production. Firstly, I absolutely loved the attic set so 4* for that and as others have posted, how it can be used to represent the family legacy. Acting wise, (and I’ll confess here that I was here to see David Suchet) I thought he was absolutely brilliant in the role of Solomon. As soon as he first appeared on stage he had won the audience over in his first few minutes on stage. His performance was top class and he had great comic timing and even making Adrian Lukis corpse during one scene. Adrian Lukis and Sion Lloyd really came into their own in Act 2 as the recriminations of their earlier life where argued out.

On the downside, I felt that with this production, it didn’t really get going until Suchet made his first appearance, and following on from that, you could see the audience become more engaged with the production as Suchet gave an acting masterclass. When he was off stage, it was almost like there was a loss of energy from the production that Suchet brings to it and when he is absent, it was definitely missed.

Act 2 I thought really did drag a bit, though the recriminations between the 2 brothers was great to watch, though as others have mentioned, the ending did fall a little flat, particularly after the intense argument scenes earlier on.

As an aside, we had a guide dog in the auditorium today who was impeccably behaved throughout the production.