How tightly Arthur Miller binds the knot of family tensions in this formally strange 1967 play, which is haunted by the Depression. In the first half, New York cop Victor wrangles with the almost 90-year-old Jewish furniture dealer Solomon over the sale of his once-wealthy parents’ possessions, piled high in a cramped apartment for over 30 years after they lost almost everything in the Wall Street Crash.
In the second the wily, zesty Solomon is shuffled largely offstage to make space for a showdown between Victor and his prodigal brother Walter, a successful – but, it turns out, troubled – doctor. Director Jonathan Munby’s sumptuously realised production successfully bridges the tonal shift between the serio-comic preamble with the surrogate father and the legacy of bitterness bequeathed to Victor and Walter by their real dad.
It features a bravura turn by Henry Goodman in the showboat part of Solomon before Elliot Cowan and John Hopkins assert themselves in act two. Faye Castelow is also excellent in the functional part of Victor’s wife Esther - her body language and expressions are detailed and period-appropriate even when the focus is not on her, and Esther’s fast-changing emotions reflect the speed at which family secrets come out.
Solomon is a hugely rich character bordering on caricature, a kvetching mix of wit, wisdom and ruefulness. Having left Russia and somehow joined the Royal Navy he’s survived three (or is it four?) marriages, several bankruptcies and the suicide of a daughter. But he keeps pressing forwards, a force of nature. It’s almost a comedic equivalent to King Lear: by the time an actor is the right age for the part, he’s too old to do it. Goodman, a spry and springy 76, gives little sense of decrepitude but superbly captures Solomon’s spirit. It’s up there with his superb Shylock in the Merchant, Tevye in Fiddler and his Billy Flynn in Chicago in terms of immersion in the role.
Cowan’s Victor is one of Miller’s beaten-down, tarnished heroes. He and Walter were chauffeur-driven college princelings, who fenced, rowed and built ham radio sets. Both looked destined for stellar careers in science. But after the Crash and their appalled mother’s death, Victor abandoned his studies to look after their shattered father while Walter went off and made a fortune. Victor’s life with Esther has been one of disappointment and delayed gratification – they put off parenting till late and at 50 he’s fearful of his looming retirement. She dislikes being seen with him in uniform because then “everybody know(s) your salary”.
In the first half Cowan’s Victor is reactive, broad shoulders wilting during arguments with Esther, then alternately exasperated and amused by Solomon. In the second we get the nuance behind his apparent self-sacrifice, and his insistence that he did things “straight”, as a cop, son and brother. Likewise John Hopkins’s Walter, who exudes sleek, lantern-jawed American success on his dramatic entrance, slowly reveals what his own actions and ambitions have cost him.
The furniture, hemming the characters in like the walls of a narrowing canyon in Jon Bausor’s meticulous set, is an obvious metaphor for the family’s legacy of hurt. And for the alterations wrought by time and circumstance, with once-coveted status symbols no longer valued. The boys’ mother’s harp stands askew, its sounding board cracked. The sale of the stagnating possessions is only happening because the building they’re housed in is being torn down for redevelopment.
Miller was in his mid-teens when the Depression hit and 52 when he wrote this. The play is pregnant with an awareness of passing years and the fragility of things. The sense that another crash could happen at any time chimes very well with our contemporary world, where everything feels suddenly provisional.
The reckoning at the end – where the price paid by all the characters is calculated – seems inevitable yet Miller springs constant surprises. The play shouldn’t work as well as it does given the way he engineers the shift in tone around the interval, but the lulling, luring early humour sets us up perfectly for the coming sucker punch.
To 7 June, marylebonetheatre.com
