The Price

Synopsis

A story of the rifts, revelations and secrets of two brothers who have followed different paths in life. One is a highly successful doctor, the other a cop working the beat. The two have been briefly re-united and are forced to face up to their past and the price of the choices they have made. Old grudges fall onto the dusty attic floor in this powerful moving and amusing play.

Our Review:

Ron Simpson - 6 April 2011

The few plays of Arthur Miller’s later career able to stand beside the four early masterpieces deal with the same themes of family, responsibility, dreams, honesty and personal responsibility. The Price, premiered in 1968, ends up reflecting Death of a Salesman and, like the early plays, it derives present problems and disputes from deep-rooted antagonisms and deceptions in the past.

The action of The Price plays continuously and was originally planned to run without an interval, though at 2 hours stage time that takes the audience out of its comfort zone. In the two act version it’s a play of two halves. In Act 1 Victor Franz, a soon-to-be-retired New York policeman, visits his father’s old apartment to sell the furniture to a dealer. His father is long dead, but the apartment has never been cleared; now the block is to be demolished. Victor skirmishes with his wife, Esther, who has problems with health, alcohol and the paltry amounts of money V...

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