Theatre reviews: The Price/Anguish With Posie

Published on Wednesday 20 January 2010 18:07

THE PRICE **** ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH ANGUISH WITH POSIE ** THE TRON, GLASGOW

IN THE week of the Massachusetts Senate election – with two competing visions of the United States locked in a bitter battle – we perhaps need no reminding that the idea of the American Dream has always been as intensely contested as it is powerful. On one hand, there's the democratic dream of the Great Society, which genuinely strives to offer equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens, regardless of their background. On the other, there's the old ideal of the Land of the Free, in which individual liberty and success trumps all other values, including compassion and solidarity.

So there's something peculiarly timely about the Royal Lyceum Theatre's revival of Arthur Miller's The Price, a play about two brothers caught on either side of this divide, and unable – even 30 years on from the events that shaped their lives – to reconcile their differences. It's no secret, of course, that Miller was politically on the side of those who wanted to make American society more compassionate and more just. His own teenage years and family life had been devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930s; and his great plays of the late 1940s contained both a clarion call to Americans to recognise social responsibilities beyond the individual and the family, and an indictment of a society that invites a man to judge his own worth purely by his ability to sell, and to buy.

Within his own family, Miller was the fortunate individualist who decided to pursue his own creative career at all costs, whereas his brother Kermit sacrificed everything to support their parents. And it's that ambivalence that lies at the heart of The Price, a richly inconclusive play in which younger brother Victor has sacrificed his future as a promising science student for the guaranteed income of an ordinary New York cop, while older brother Walter has become a glitteringly wealthy and successful doctor, sending home a bare five dollars a month for the support of his family.

Three decades on, in the mid-1960s, they meet to discuss what to do with their parents' handsome old Edwardian furniture, now that the house where they once lived is about to be pulled down. But their conflicting creeds make their conversation an increasingly acrimonious dialogue of the deaf. And their conflict is not eased by the presence either of Victor's exasperated wife Esther – increasingly resentful of his unwillingness to accept any help from his wealthy brother – or of old Gregory Solomon, the 89-year-old dealer whose effort to put a price on the furniture becomes the most complex of metaphors for the price Victor has paid for his decisions in lost wealth and status, and the price Walter has paid in lost love and human connectedness.

The Price is a good, old-fashioned drama built around credible characters and strong, wordy conversation. Without reaching any simple conclusions, it achieves an extraordinarily complete and adult level of debate about the wider meaning and context of the personal life-choices we make, and it's that searching, penetrating quality of the drama that is best reflected in John Dove's fine, un-showy Lyceum production. There are pitch-perfect performances from a slightly bewildered-looking Greg Powrie as Victor; from a smooth-talking but vulnerable Aden Gillett as Walter, and from a delightful James Hayes as old Solomon; and if Sally Edwards sometimes seems a shade hesitant as Esther, she also captures something essential about the brittle, uneasy brightness of a feisty New York girl who suddenly finds herself facing middle age without the status or comfort for which she once hoped.

Although The Price is not the kind of play that offers a spectacular or innovative night out, audiences seem to find it deeply satisfying, perhaps because it addresses them as grown-ups who have made their own decisions, but who also know that in making them, they have always been creatures of the people and times that made them, and never, in that sense, been wholly free.

There's no need to dwell, by contrast, on the author, scriptwriter and stand-up comic Ian Macpherson's first play Anguish With Posie, playing this week at the Tron Theatre. Set in the modest Glasgow flat of a deeply dislikeable middle-aged boy-man of a writer, this brief two-handed drama focuses, in a relentlessly self-absorbed way, both on the processes of writerly creativity – writers' block, paranoia, missed deadlines, fear of failure following an early success – and on the petulant Aengus's ludicrously failed relationship with his long-abandoned daughter, who he thinks must be about 12, but who is in fact already 20.

There's an attractive performance from Nicola Daley as Posie, the girl who arrives in response to his advert for an amanuensis; a strikingly bad one from an embarrassed-looking Macpherson as Aengus; and a plot twist so obvious and long-drawn-out that it's more like a protracted nasty itch than a piece of dramatic irony. There's also a certain pleasing absurdism about Macpherson's Irish-accented style, part Flann O'Brien, part Sam Beckett, and the show has a delicious final minute, in which Aengus and Posie finally get down to work, transcending their differences in a flight of creative and humorous invention.

It's frustrating, though, to arrive so late at what should clearly have been the play's starting-point. And although this is the kind of stuff that might amuse some members of a creative community interested only in gazing at its own navel, I'm afraid that for the rest of us, out in the real world where economies collapse and lives are changed for ever, it's difficult to see any point to Macpherson's introverted musings; and even more difficult to care whether he muses, or not.

&149 The Price runs until 13 February; Anguish With Posie until 23 January.