Review: Hinta
Theatrical review: What does brotherhood cost, asks Arthur Miller’s Price
The actors have all their senses open in the family drama at the Helsinki City Theatre.
Suddenly, you might think that the closest relationships would be free. However, Arthur Miller’s play The Price proves the opposite. Unsolicited relationships, such as brotherhood, are paid the highest price when the time comes.
The real place in this performance comes as quickly as the genre, i.e. closed psychological drama, allows. On the other hand, letting things build in peace feels like a fresh exception in today’s turmoil.
Victor (Santeri Kinnunen), a young New Yorker, shelved his dream of becoming a scientist and focused on taking care of his father, whose wealth disappeared like ashes in the wind with the depression of the late 1920s.
The dissatisfied wife Ester (Aino Seppo) follows her husband and complains about wrong choices. Brother Walter (Eero Aho) chose differently and ended up as a successful surgeon. Now, 28 years later, Victor is finally about to start selling his father’s estate.
The brothers haven’t seen each other in sixteen years, but now Walter shows up with a bunch of suggestions to start a clean slate. The estate is assessed by the ancient antique dealer Gregory Solomon (Esko Salminen), a man who is definitely not just doing his job.
The uneventfulness of this performance is only apparent, as the twists and whirlpools float beneath the surface, making the atmosphere torturous. This is thanks to director Paavo Westerberg and the actors who are open to all their senses, who achieve unimaginable performances when they attack their own emotional mounds in the middle of a pile of furniture.
Fortunately, things are not as black and white as the initial setting suggests. Thus, neither Kinnunen’s kind self-sacrificer nor Aho’s cool success remain men of the same trait.
Esko Salminen’s Solomon is an endearing combination of the exhaustion of a soon-to-be-90-year-old businessman and a burning desire to keep up with the action.
Solomon’s way of hitting the story, the need to take a nap and eat an egg at a certain time also bring some laughter to the performance.
The viewer is truly rewarded when the mental twists begin to unravel with the revelations.
In Walter’s words, the brothers’ past was a trap, and their ways out of it were different. In this light, the culprit and victim thinking begins to seem unnecessary.
The performance is especially touching when it shows what kind of struggle it can be to find a connection with another person. Even if the real cause of the resentment begins to dissipate, it may have become a kind of locked state of mind for the bearer. The bridge will not be built, no matter how sincere the opposing side’s attempt to cross the abyss is.