CityLife

David Thacker uses Miller to get The Price right

David Thacker (right) with Arthur Miller

Few would dispute that Arthur Miller is simply one of the towering figures of modern theatre. But if asked to name his greatest works, most people would probably say A View From The Bridge or Death Of A Salesman, or perhaps The Crucible or All My Sons.

“I’m 100 per cent certain that The Price is right up there with his very best,” asserts David Thacker, who’s bringing his new version of that masterpiece to the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, from next week.

The Price is a compassionate family drama that is funny, surprising and heart-rending as it examines the relationship between two brothers, dealing with the sacrifices they have both made throughout their lives.

In the attic of a soon-to-be-demolished house in New York in 1968, two brothers, Victor and Walter, meet for the first time in 16 years to sell off the possessions left by their deceased father.

Reunited after years of misunderstanding, they set about dealing with the pain that lies at the heart of their estranged
relationship.

As they confront their history, 89-year-old furniture dealer Solomon haggles over the remnants of their lives. After all, everything has a price, doesn’t it?
Solomon, a great comic creation, will be played by Kenneth Alan Taylor, who has appeared in nearly 300 productions at Oldham Coliseum Theatre as well as twice being chief executive there.

Joining him on stage will be Colin Stinton, who previously appeared on the Octagon stage in Oleanna in 2009, for which he received an MEN Theatre Awards Best Actor nomination, and Tom Mannion playing the two brothers, Walter and Victor Franz.

Victor’s wife, Esther, will be played by Blackpool-born Suzan Sylvester, who has previously worked with Thacker at the Young Vic Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing the role of Marina in his award-winning 1991 RSC production of Pericles.

David can legitimately claim to have more insight than most into Miller’s own ideas about his plays, having worked closely with him on numerous occasions, including an earlier production of The Price, which David directed in 1990 during his time as artistic director for London’s Young Vic, when he was lucky enough to have Miller in attendance at rehearsals during the last 10 days of the process.

This enabled David to get a real insight into how The Price was originally envisioned by the New York writer, who died in 2005, aged 89.

“He took us through the text moment by moment, clarifying anything that confused us, describing many of the impulses that led him to write the play,” David remembers.

“He was a remarkable man – charismatic, kind, intelligent, generous and very funny.

“He helped us to dig deep to find the pain and grief at the heart of the play while remaining alert to its wit and humour.”

But how, I wondered, had Miller come to be there at all?

“The first time we had any contact was a few years before that, when I was about to direct a version of Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People that Arthur had translated.

“Once I’d secured the rights, one of the challenges was that I felt that some of the language in Arthur’s translation was simply too American.

“‘What would he think if I changed a few words?’, I asked his agent. To my surprise, they said, ‘Why don’t you call and ask him?’

“So I found myself talking to him on the phone and, slightly nervously, explaining to him that, although I thought it’s actually a much better play in his version, there was just the odd word that would sound strange coming from English actors.

“He simply said, ‘Why don’t you just make any changes you like?’ Of course, in those days there was no such thing as email or even a fax, so all of our exchanges were over the phone, which is much more personal, and our relationship grew from that.

“That production transferred to the West End and Arthur decided he’d like to come over and see it and also spend some time in rehearsal with Two Way Mirror, a double-bill of his that I was also going to be directing.

“I was terrified at first, of course, and it was also halfway through the rehearsal period, which can be quite boring and technical if you’re not actually on the stage.

“So I said that ‘if you ever do this again, why don’t you come closer to the end of rehearsals?’

“That’s just what he did a while later when we were going to do The Price. That was a production over which he was quite fussy because, as far as he was concerned it was the British Premiere of a play which had not had very successful productions before that.

“He came over in the last week of rehearsals, which were in place called Copperfield Street that was, as you might guess, very Dickensian! By that stage in rehearsals there were all sorts of things scattered around the place and when he came in he looked around and said, ‘Hey, this is just like the attic!’

“As you can probably imagine, all the actors were a bit nervous so I’d said to them ‘let’s just have a run-through’. At the end of that, I said to Arthur ‘why don’t you come up and say something?’

“He said, ‘do you really mean I can say anything?’. So for the next three days we were effectively directing it together, with him breaking it down into units and just offering the most remarkable, unique insights.

“It was the most creative time I’d ever experienced. Playwrights can be incisive about their work, but they are not necessarily good at working with actors. Arthur especially loved British actors because, he said, of their facility with language, which went back to them working on text-based plays.

“He also loved the idea that actors over here tended, perhaps more than American actors, to have a passion for the politics of plays.

“They see it as a high calling and Arthur was always engaged by the sorts of discussions he could have with intelligent actors. When people are open to discuss these ideas, it’s a very fertile environment.

“As a director of Arthur Miller’s plays, my function and central drive is to express the playwright’s play for him and for the audience.

“Coming back to The Price, I’m astonished yet again by how great a play it is. Of course, lots of people already know that. But Arthur Miller was also one of the funniest people I’ve ever come across. What people aren’t perhaps that conscious of is his massive facility for humour and very astute wit, even in his darkest plays.”

The Price is at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, from March 10 (Thursday) to April 2, 2011.