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by Arthur Miller, directed by Diana Leblanc

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

September 2-October 22, 2011

Soulpepper is currently presenting an excellent production of Arthur Miller’s 1968 drama The Price.  While the play may not be as famous as Death of a Salesman (1949) or The Crucible (1953), in its own slow, garrulous way it is every bit as disturbing.  Where in the earlier two plays Miller shows us a tragedy as it unfolds, in The Price a tragedy has occurred in the past and continues to ruin people’s lives in the present.

The situation will be painfully familiar to any viewers who have outlived their parents.  The New York brownstone where Victor Franz and his brother Walter grew up is about to be torn down and the brothers, who haven’t spoken in sixteen years, must finally decide what to do with all the family possessions that have accumulated in the attic, a chaos of clutter artfully designed by Phillip Silver.  By selecting a name out of the phonebook, Victor has chosen a 90-year-old appraiser to assess the value of the attic’s contents.  When, despite expectations, Walter shows up all the rancour that led to the brothers’ estrangement comes to the fore.

The play is structured in the form of three dialogues between Victor and the other three characters--with his wife Esther and the appraiser Gregor Solomon in Act 1 and with Walter in Act 2.  From the first dialogue we learn that Esther views the sale of the family possessions as a chance for her and Victor finally to live a life of their own choosing.  He sacrificed the career he dreamed of in science to care for his father who was ruined in the stock market crash of 1929.  Victor’s mother died shortly after the crash and left Victor’s father believing he had no friends in the world.  Instead of finishing university, Victor became a policeman, a job he has always loathed, to earn enough money to keep his father going.

In Victor’s view, Walter, who escaped the situation to become a successful doctor, contributed only a pittance to their father’s welfare and let Victor bear the entire emotional and financial burden himself.    

The second dialogue with Solomon a first seems to be a long comic interlude.  While Victor simply wants to conduct a business transaction, Solomon likes to get to know his clients.  For an extraordinarily long time he evades Victor’s question about the price by relating personal anecdotes and indulging in numerous eccentric diversions.  As director Diana Leblanc makes clear at the very end, Solomon is a symbolic stand-in for the Franz brothers’ father.  The opposing feelings that Victor and Walter have towards Solomon reflect the views they had toward their own father.  We enjoy seeing how Solomon gradually breaks down Victor’s frosty reaction to him until Victor even admits the old man is “lovable”, but, as we discover later, Victor’s comic capitulation to Solomon mirrors his own tragic capitulation to his father in the past.

Miller uses the third dialogue to overturn completely what we thought we knew.  Walter presents an entirely different vision of the past.  At first we think he is merely self-serving and trying to escape being cast as the villain.  Gradually, however, he presents a compelling case that not only is Victor’s view of the past a lie but, worse, that Victor actually knows it is a lie.  

When Christopher Newton directed the play for Theatre Aquarius in 2008, he emphasized the ambiguity of the text so that the audience was left with the conundrum of which brother’s version of the truth was the right one.  Leblanc, however, takes a much darker view of the play and emphasizes that the failure of the brothers to reconcile is tragic.  In his memoir Timebends, Miller writes, “Despite my wishes I could not tamper with something the play and life seemed to be telling me: that we were doomed to perpetuate our illusions because the truth was too costly to face.”  This is exactly the quietly devastating impression Leblanc’s production gives us.

It’s great to see Michael Hanrahan take on a lead role at Soulpepper that gives his acting ability full expression.  He shows that the ironically named Victor as a man already beaten down by time before he is even fifty.  The tedium of his work has drained any enthusiasm for what he should do after his retirement.  Yet, beneath the dulled surface, Hanrahan lets us glimpse sparks of what Victor used to be--his joy at discovering an old radio he built, sentimentality when discussing his mother, disgust at the lack of a social safety net in the United States.  While we sympathize with Victor, Hanrahan shows that Walter’s version of the past is all-too-plausible since Victor desperately needs to believe his own vision of his great sacrifice to avoid seeing that it might have been totally meaningless.

Stuart Hughes’s Walter first appears slick and unlikeable and seems to confirm the negative impression Victor and Esther have given of him for the entire first half of the play.  While we never warm to him, Hughes does lend Walter enough authority that despite our wariness we do begin to lend credence to what he says and to question Victor’s version of the past.  Hughes’ performance is not as layered as Hanrahan’s but it is still no mean trick to get an audience to believe the words of someone they’ve been led not to trust.

Jane Spence presents Esther as a woman full of contradictions.  She is unhappy with the life she has led and would like to blame Victor for it but also realizes that it was her choice to marry him.  She upbraids Victor for being too kind-hearted but crucially at the end comes to see that that very quality is what attracted her to him.  Her change from backing the practicality of Walter to the emotionalism of Victor recapitulates her inner thoughts when she first met and fell in love with him.

As Solomon, David Fox gives one of his best ever performances in a career of great performances.  It is really worth the price of admission just to see him.  He steers clear of all the possibilities for presenting Solomon as a Jewish stereotype and instead gives us a complex portrait of an aged man and survivor of multiple political upheavals.  Throughout all his delays in getting around to telling Victor the price he will pay for the attic contents, Fox leaves us in doubt whether Solomon is merely eccentric and easily distracted or whether these are all calculated tactics so refined over the years that they now are second nature to him.  Fox derives humour from closely observed human behaviour.  The sight of Solomon eating a hard-boiled egg and searching for the fallen bits of shell on his clothing is hilarious just because it’s to true to life.

While the title of the play may refer most obviously to the price that Solomon will pay the Franz brothers for their furniture, it clearly also refers to the price Victor, Esther and Walter have all paid for their past decisions.  Walter thinks we can choose what we become, but how can that be true when we can’t always know what we are buying into.  Leblanc has so carefully calculated the ending that the audience should try to hold its applause until the dark goes absolutely dark.  She has Silver, also the lighting designer, gradually fade out at the very end until there is only a pinspot left shining David Fox’s open mouth as Solomon sits in Victor’s father’s chair listing to recorded laughter.  Is this the rictus of death or a horrid sign of the older generation celebrating yet again its destruction of the younger.  While the play may meander to its conclusion, this final image sums up the demonic aspect in The Price that Leblanc has uncovers that makes the play so unsettling.         

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Michael Hanrahan and Stuart Hughes. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.