"The more you can throw it away the more it's beautiful." So says Solomon, an antique furniture dealer in Arthur Miller's The Price, of our disposable culture. But Miller's play, rather like the Spanish Jacobean table that occupies centre stage, has a mahogany durability that resists the passage of time.
Written in 1968, the play shows Miller returning to one of his favourite themes: our need to accept responsibility for our own lives. He illustrates this through the confrontation of long-separated siblings over the sale of the family furniture. Victor, who sacrificed his education to look after their Depression-ruined father and who wound up a humble cop, wants redress; Walter, who got out to become a successful New York surgeon, craves absolution.Watched by Victor's angry wife and the shrewd Solomon, the two brothers confront their irreconcilable hopes and the illusory nature of their lives.
Obviously the title is symbolic: it refers not just to the sum offered for the furniture but to the emotional price each brother has paid. In tethering himself to a conniving father, Victor has subscribed to an empty dream: as his brother resonantly points out, "we invent ourselves, Vic, to wipe out what we know."
For his part Walter has succumbed to the dubious American ethic that material success will create a protective wall against unhappiness. Even if there is some- thing a touch schematic about this neat fraternal antithesis, Miller builds up a fine head of steam in the climactic confrontation.
But the real joy of the play lies in the character of the wily, life-loving 89-year-old Solomon who contradicts the image of Miller as a writer of graveyard solemnity.
Far from overacting, Warren Mitchell plays him to perfection. With his walrus-white moustache and ill-fitting suit, he looks like some battered derelict. But Mitchell endows him with a skipping friskiness that justifies his claim to have been an acrobat and that suggests he still gets an orgiastic pleasure out of furniture appraisal. Even Mitchell's interventions in the fraternal rows implies the character has the residual wisdom of a natural Solomon.
Sean Holmes' production, however, never allows the character to unbalance the play. Larry Lamb's Victor artfully suggests a decent man corroded by vengeful anger. Des McAleer's Walter is fuelled by success-worshipping neurosis. Sian Thomas lends Victor's wife a passionate vehemence that suggests she has paid a heavy price for her husband's integrity. Transferred from the Tricycle, the production has lost little of its original ensemble drive. And, although the play may seem old-fashioned to some, it reminds us that Miller's permanent theme is responsibility.
· Until January 17. Box office: 0870 890 1101.
