ETHICS AND EVASIONS
It’s a cluttered upper room, overcrowded with grand old furniture, a gramophone, harp, oddities like fencing foils and a home-built valve radio. The sense is of heavy old-fashioned prosperity worn to junk. It’s sixteen years since the old man died, ruined in the 1936 crash, but nothing has been moved or sold. Now in 1968 his two sons need to clear it as the building is demolished. Vic’s in charge: Elliot Cowan looking resignedly weary,
still in police uniform as he pulls down dusty sheets, looks around in memory and winces at his wife Esther’’s belief that this sale might produce enough money for a new life where his low-grade NYPD job won’t embarrass and bore her. The dealer Mr Solomon arrives, rising from the stairwell beneath a black hat and puffing “another couple steps, I’d be in heaven!” . It is Henry Goodman. We know we’re safe. Frankly, it takes no more than a couple of shrugging “What can you do?”s to get devoted Goodman fans like me willing to accept any price he offers. Especially when, as Esther gives him a hard look and departs, he amiably says “I like her – she’s suspicious!”.
Arthur Miller’s is play of two halves: first domestic, often comic, practical, set firm in its moment. Then, once its fourth protagonist brother Walter has risen from the stairway as the first act ends it will stir into the rages, revelations and agonies which MIller does so lethally well. Jonathan Munby’s direction is steady, unflashy, just right.
Actually Walter, unseen , is a presence before he steps onstage: the prosperous brother who completed his medical education to become a rich doctor while Vic stayed with their father, couldn’t afford to complete school but supported old Dad and joined the police for 28 years of routine and waste of his scientific brain, alongside an increasingly depressed wife. He and the dealer go through a series of irritations, endings and returns, but gradually each of them melt: skilfully handled is Vic’s irritation and Solomon’s manipulative teasing. It creates an odd connection. Solomon is 98 and had actually almost retired; Vic, he observes, probably used an old phone book. He likes to reveal his past: five countries after fleeing Russia, a discharge from the British Royal Navy, on the variety bill as one of the Five Solomons acrobatic act; 62 years in the furniture trade, a daughter lost to suicide in 1915 who he still sees in a vision. All this between expatiating what we all know now – and even 1968 did : that classic brown furniture just doesn’t sell easily in an age of smaller apartments and everything becoming disposable. As he makes this latter point a remarkable eruption of helpless amusement flows through the theatre as Goodman bangs on a big dining table and observes “A man sits down at a table like this – he’ knows not only he’s married, he’s gotta stay married!”. Then he thoughtfully extracts and peels a hardboiled egg. “You want I should starve?” And comes up with a price. a low one.
Which does not go well with Walter (John Hopkins resplendent in a coat that would cost his brother a year’s pay). In the second half he confuses the issue, debates the price, finally offers a donation-tax-fiddle which would bring in more, which of course Vic could have all of, so generous is the top-dog brother. After this the two men – with interruptions from the back bedroom from Solomon – deal beautifully with the startling, rising emotional temperature, that lethal Arthur-Miller patchwork of resentment, revelation, claim and denial, accusation and excuse and admission.
The shadow of the miseries of the 1936 crash which sent men like their father into shocked poverty – “a man who couldn’t bounce” – is over both the cop with lost self- confidence and the prosperous doctor who still lives on a nervous cliff-edge . Money anxiety is the master over them all, though considerably less over Solomon, since he’s been ruined several times already and doesn’t take it so badly.
Family secrets open: Walter may not be quite the villain, and the father Vic kept alive with pity and sacrifice may not have deserved it. Miller’s own had just died, which must have sharpened his familiar lifelong wrestle with ideas of moral responsibility.
But in this now rarely-seen play, somehow, two small redemptions happen. One concerns Esther (Faye Castelow coming wonderfully into her own in the final scenes). And the other is just the old, old dealer Solomon, with sudden energy telling Vic not to call Walter back. In the last moment he’s alone, laughing at life amid the armoires that will never fit through modern doorways and the harp with a broken sound-box .
marylebonetheatre.com to 7 June
rating 5
theatreCat 