As he prepares to direct Arthur Miller’s The Price at the Marylebone Theatre, Jonathan Munby reflects on memory, responsibility, and the enduring question at the heart of the play: what do we truly pay for the lives we choose?
Arthur Miller’s The Price is a play about what remains of families, of choices, and of the lives we might have lived. As Jonathan Munby prepares to direct a new production at the Marylebone Theatre, opening on 23 April, he returns to a writer who has shaped him from the very beginning of his career. For Munby, Miller is not simply a dramatist of the past, but a living presence – a playwright whose moral questions feel, if anything, more urgent today. “Not just as a director,” he says, “but as a human being.”
Jonathan Munby is a director whose work combines rigorous attention to text with a keen sensitivity to contemporary life. Equally at home with Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and opera, he is known for productions that are psychologically acute, actor-centred, and emotionally precise. Alongside his directing career, he is also a committed teacher and mentor, having worked extensively in drama training at the highest level, a dual practice that has shaped his collaborative, performer-led approach to making theatre.
For this new production of The Price, Munby returns to a writer who has accompanied him since his earliest days in the theatre. His relationship with Miller began when, as a young assistant director on All My Sons, he found himself repeatedly drawn back into the auditorium, night after night, to witness the extraordinary impact Miller’s writing had on an audience. That experience, he says, never left him. Miller’s plays have remained part of his artistic and moral compass, “not just as a director, but as a human being.”
Revisiting The Price now, Munby is struck by how urgently it speaks to the present moment. Written in the late 1960s but rooted in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the play explores how individuals survive social and economic collapse — a question that resonates strongly in a post-pandemic world. At its core, he sees it as “a play about the cost of the past — about choices made years ago and how they continue to haunt the present,” and about “whether sacrifice or self-interest truly offers a way through.”
Those opposing responses are embodied in the play’s two brothers, who have endured the same formative trauma but emerged with radically different philosophies of survival. One retreats into self-sacrifice, suspicion, and withdrawal; the other confronts life head-on, meeting adversity with force. Munby resists romanticising either position. The play, he suggests, is less interested in moral judgement than in the emotional reckoning that follows: the price each brother pays for the life he has chosen.
At the centre of that reckoning is Solomon, the elderly antiques dealer whose arrival in the brothers’ attic apartment acts as both catalyst and mirror. Casting Henry Goodman in the role was, for Munby, an instinctive decision. “Solomon requires immense precision, wit, and humanity,” he explains. “Henry fits the role like a glove.” More than a supporting figure, Solomon becomes the play’s moral hinge, at once salesman, survivor, provocateur, and witness to the brothers’ unresolved past.
Munby’s approach to the play is rooted in naturalism, but never at the expense of theatrical intensity. He is deeply attentive to language as rhythm and music, something he associates equally with Miller and Shakespeare, and to the idea that characters must be treated as real people, “with beating hearts, making choices that come back to haunt them.” That attention extends into the rehearsal room, shaped by his long experience working with actors at every stage of their careers. “Collaboration,” he insists, “is not optional. You ignore what your actors are saying at your peril.”
The Attic
The production’s striking set design is central to this collaborative vision. Set within a densely packed attic, the space becomes what Munby describes as “a pressure chamber of memory,” filled with the accumulated weight of objects, history, and unspoken grievance. The design does not simply frame the action; it actively compresses it. As time, resentment, and suppressed emotion close in, the attic becomes a psychological crucible.
“When the brothers finally take their gloves off,” Munby observes, “what erupts isn’t physical violence, but emotional truth.”
Often described as one of Miller’s quieter plays, The Price strikes Munby as anything but. He prefers to think of it as incisive, a late work (1968) in which Miller distils his preoccupations with family, memory, responsibility, and regret into a tightly focused chamber piece. With only four characters and no external spectacle, the drama builds inward, accumulating pressure until release becomes inevitable.
Whether that release offers reconciliation or merely clarity remains an open question. The play’s ending, Munby suggests, is deliberately ambiguous, perhaps even pessimistic, and all the more truthful for it.
In staging The Price today, Munby is less interested in imposing interpretation than in “releasing” the play, trusting the craftsmanship of Miller’s writing and allowing its moral complexity to speak. What emerges is a production that asks searching questions about how we live with the past, how we justify our choices, and what, ultimately, we are willing, or unwilling, to pay.
The Price
by Arthur Miller
Directed by Jonathan Munby
Marylebone Theatre, London
17 April – 7 June 2026
Cast: Henry Goodman (Yes, Prime Minister, Fiddler On The Roof, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui); Faye Castelow (Leopoldstadt, After the Dance); Elliot Cowan (A Little Life, 2.22) and John Hopkins (Dr Strangelove, 39 Steps).
Set designer: Jon Bausor
Photo credit: Mark Senior