The Price at a glance

Show
The Price
Venue
Marylebone Theatre
Address
Rudolf Steiner House, 35 Park Road, London NW1 6XT
Nearest station
Baker Street (5 min walk); Regent's Park (5 min walk)
Genre
Drama
Running time
2 hours 30 minutes, including one interval
Age guidance
14+ (under-16s must be accompanied)
Dates
Final performance: 7 June 2026
Schedule
Tue–Fri 7:30pm; matinees Sat and Sun 2:30pm
Price range
From £30 (up to £94)
Writer
Arthur Miller
Director
Jonathan Munby

Expert Review: The Price at Marylebone Theatre

4.6
★★★★★

LTH Expert Rating

Reviewed by the London Theatre Hub editorial team. Last updated: 2 May 2026.

The Verdict

Arthur Miller's 1968 drama has spent decades living in the shadow of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible — two plays so dominant in the Miller canon that everything else risks feeling like an also-ran. Jonathan Munby's production at Marylebone Theatre makes a compelling case for reassessment. This is a play that knows exactly what it is: four characters in a single room, over the course of a single day, digging through furniture and old wounds in roughly equal measure. The intimacy of the Marylebone's auditorium suits it perfectly — there is nowhere for these people to hide, and neither is there for the audience.

Henry Goodman's Gregory Solomon is the production's dominant force. The 89-year-old furniture dealer who arrives to appraise Victor Franz's late father's possessions is written by Miller as a figure of near-mythic resilience — a man who has survived everything the 20th century threw at him and somehow retained a sense of the absurd. Goodman plays him with extraordinary precision: the physical comedy of the first act, including a memorable scene involving a hard-boiled egg, is genuinely funny, but it never blurs the sadness underneath. He commands the first half so thoroughly that the second half's handover to Elliot Cowan and John Hopkins feels like a gear change. But that gear change is Miller's point, and Munby trusts the text enough to let it happen without papering over the structural seam.

Cowan and Hopkins take the baton well. As Victor, the cop who gave up his ambitions to support a father who didn't need supporting, Cowan plays a man constructed almost entirely of suppressed emotion — patient, decent, and quietly furious beneath the surface. Hopkins's Walter, the surgeon who escaped and succeeded, is harder to like and harder to dismiss. Miller gives neither brother a clean moral verdict, and the production honours that ambiguity throughout.

What Makes It Special

  • Henry Goodman's landmark performance. Goodman is one of the finest stage actors working in Britain today. His Gregory Solomon — vaudevillian, heartbreaking, and shrewdly unstoppable — has drawn five-star responses from The Daily Telegraph and WhatsOnStage, and it is the kind of performance that makes you grateful you caught a run before it closed. The first half is essentially his show.
  • A play being properly discovered. The critical consensus around this production suggests The Price is finally receiving the attention it deserves after decades in the shadow of Miller's better-known works. The Guardian called it a powerful, winding drama that ought to be revived far more often — and this production is the argument for why.
  • Jon Bausor's attic set. Designer Jon Bausor fills the Marylebone stage with a genuine accumulation of furniture, props, and domestic objects from the Franz family's history. The effect is claustrophobic and immediate — the weight of the past made physical. In a play about what we inherit and what we refuse to let go of, that design does real dramatic work.
  • The intimate venue. Marylebone Theatre seats around 270 and has built a remarkable reputation in its short life for staging work of exceptional quality. The scale puts the audience close enough to read every shift in these performances — which, in a play this dependent on contained emotional pressure, matters enormously.
  • The full company's quality. Faye Castelow as Esther Franz — Victor's wife, by turns sardonic and desperate — rounds out a four-person cast in which no one is wasted. All four performers are working at the level the play demands.

You'll love The Price if you...

  • Enjoy drama that stays entirely within one room and one day — and wrings everything from that constraint
  • Want to see one of Britain's greatest stage actors at the height of his powers
  • Are interested in Arthur Miller beyond the two or three plays everyone knows
  • Like plays where the moral argument is genuine — no heroes, no clear verdicts
  • Appreciate intimate venues where the proximity to the performances is part of the experience

It might not be for you if you...

  • Find the second half's change of pace frustrating — some critics noted a slower gear after Goodman's first-act dominance
  • Prefer large-scale productions with complex staging
  • Are looking for light, escapist entertainment — this is Miller at his most emotionally demanding
  • Aren't patient with slow-burn drama that builds through dialogue rather than action
  • Are bringing children under 14 — the play requires emotional maturity and sustained attention

Best for

  • Drama fans
  • Arthur Miller devotees
  • Date night
  • Fans of great acting
  • Intimate theatre lovers
  • 14+ and above

Not recommended for younger children or those seeking lighter theatrical fare.

Critical Reception

The Price opened at Marylebone Theatre in April 2026 to strong critical acclaim, with the majority of reviewers awarding four or five stars. Henry Goodman's performance drew near-universal praise, with critics divided only on whether the play's structural shift in Act Two constitutes a flaw or a feature. The Daily Telegraph and WhatsOnStage gave five stars; The Guardian, Financial Times, The Stage, and The Standard all awarded four. Verified star ratings from major UK publications:

  • The Daily Telegraph ★★★★★
  • WhatsOnStage ★★★★★
  • The Guardian ★★★★
  • Financial Times ★★★★
  • The Stage ★★★★
  • The Standard ★★★★
  • Everything Theatre ★★★★
  • Time Out ★★★

Source: published reviews of the Marylebone Theatre production, April 2026.

Everything You Need to Know

What happens in The Price?

The Price takes place entirely in a single afternoon in the attic of a condemned New York brownstone, among the accumulated possessions of the Franz family — furniture, objects, and memories that have been sitting undisturbed for years. Victor Franz, a New York police officer approaching fifty and eligible for retirement, has arranged to sell the furniture. His wife Esther has come with him. The furniture dealer who has agreed to appraise the lot is Gregory Solomon, a 90-year-old man of formidable energy and enigmatic intent.

The brothers meet

Walter Franz, Victor's brother and a successful surgeon, arrives unexpectedly. The two men have not spoken in sixteen years. The proximate cause of their estrangement runs deeper than the family's financial collapse during the Depression: Victor gave up his ambitions and his chance at education to support their father, while Walter left, built a career, and became wealthy. The furniture sale becomes the occasion for relitigating that decision — not to reverse it, but to establish, once and for all, what it actually meant.

The first act: Solomon's show

Much of the first act belongs to Gregory Solomon, who arrives with a battered briefcase, a hard-boiled egg, and a lifetime of accumulated pragmatism. His negotiation with Victor over the value of the furniture is comedic on the surface — Solomon is by turns vaudevillian and piercing — but Miller uses it to introduce the play's central question: how much is anything actually worth, and who decides? Solomon has lived through a century of loss and come out the other side still functioning. His presence is a reminder that most things survive.

The second act: the reckoning

With Solomon in the background, the second act focuses on the confrontation between Victor and Walter. Walter has come partly to offer Victor money, partly with a project of revisionism: the story of their father's helplessness, Walter argues, was exaggerated. The money could have been found. Victor's sacrifice wasn't necessary. What he gave up, he gave up for nothing. Whether Walter is right — and Miller declines to say definitively — becomes less important than what Victor chooses to do with the information. Cowan's Victor understands, by the end, how he has allowed himself to be manipulated for decades. The question is whether understanding changes anything at all.

The ending

The closing image is Solomon's: left alone with the furniture after the brothers leave, he puts on an old record and laughs. It is one of Miller's most ambiguous endings — a laugh that could be pleasure, absurdity, relief, or simple persistence. In a play about the weight of the past, the old man who has outlasted it all gets the final word.