Victor is facing 50 and all he can hear is the nagging of his wife, Esther, who wants him to retire from his dead-end job with the police, go back to college and start a new career. Esther is tired of being less affluent than her neighbours and friends - especially Walter, Victor's estranged older brother and a big shot in the medical field. At college, Walter was no more talented at science than Victor. Only Victor dropped out of college to look after his ageing father, a former millionaire who was crushed when he lost everything in the Wall Street crash of 1929, and ended up as a cop on the beat. Walter refused to sacrifice his career.
Now, years after their father's death, the brothers gather to dispose of his furniture and settle accounts with each other. They are constantly interrupted by Solomon, a retired furniture dealer who is busy totting up a price for the last remnants of a life - and a way of life - that has disappeared. Solomon has an eye not only for chairs and tables but also for human nature, observing that "the average family really love each other like crazy until their parents die".
Like the father's furniture, Arthur Miller's 1968 play is a solid, old-fashioned piece of a kind that isn't made any more. On one hand, it is bad that such meaty family dramas of wider moral conundrums have all but disappeared from the theatre. On the other, TV soap operas provide quite enough naturalistic, psychologically driven family melodrama, leaving theatre to explore more interesting terrain. But if this is what your taste runs to, there is plenty to enjoy, particularly as the drama is less earnest and far funnier than much of Miller's work.
Sean Holmes's detailed production is a great pleasure as it conveys the sense of a family still being destroyed by the events of almost half a century earlier. Warren Mitchell as the slippery Solomon shamelessly overacts to terrific effect. Larry Lamb is superb as Victor, the good coward, and Sian Thomas conveys Esther's dissatisfaction and struggle with herself in every movement. In the most difficult role, Des McAleer keeps you guessing as to whether Walter is a good man gone bad, or a bad man turned good.
· Until December 7. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
