The Price by Arthur Miller. Daniel Mitchell, Toni Scanlan, Warren Mitchell, Henri Szeps directed by Sandra Bates. Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, November 8 2001 - January 19.
If you assumed that any play at the Ensemble starring this cast would be a near-perfect production, you'd be right. I squeezed in to the matinee in the last week of the run, and arrived to a justifiable "House Full" sign - through to closing night.
To say The Price is classic Arthur Miller is to dismiss too easily his creation of characters whose complexity is rooted in both their natural personality differences and their familial relationships. To see Henri Szeps as elder brother Walter in tears of apparent self-recognition, frustrated at not being able to explain to younger brother Victor why he hadn't provided the cash for Victor's university education, despite his own success as a surgeon, while he had to admit to failure as a father and husband - and to see this a few short metres away in the intimate Ensemble setting - is an unforgettable experience.
Though Hayes Gordon, the founder of the Ensemble, is no longer with us, his exacting theatrical spirit lives on. Since he introduced in-the-round staging to Sydney more than 30 years ago, the fly-on-the-wall effect for the audience is still as strong. Watching invisibly in such close proximity creates a fascinating double-effect: your emotions are directly engaged in Walter's tears, yet concurrently your capacity for objective observation is not diminished. Walter's tears may be real, yet are also disingenuous: he can only offer Victor a superficial, basically commercial, proposition - a measure of why he failed Victor in the first place 28 years in the past.
Sandra Bates' direction has allowed the actors all the silences they need for us to sense and contemplate such detail in all four characters, and all four actors waste no opportunity. I wish, I wish, we had an Australian Arthur Miller to reveal such characters in our cultural context, but I fear our fascination with "physical" theatre (which I love too) leaves a space to be filled. It's not just warmth of feeling we miss, but the analysis of family, social, political and economic relations which are all built in to Miller's characters.
Did I say a "near-perfect" production? Let's just say perfect and be done with it.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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