Miller Time

Lorcan Cranitch has been acting for 22 years but obviously still is as excited as hell by the idea of playing one of the lead roles in The Price at the Gate Theatre. And why wouldn’t he be? It’s a play written by Arthur Miller, who was recently voted the world’s greatest living playwright by the theatre website Whatsonstage.com.

The play is being directed by Mark Brokaw, one of America’s most prestigious directors, and one of Cranitch’s co-stars is Robert Prosky, aka Sergeant Jablonski from Hill Street Blues. Prosky also was twice nominated for Tony Awards on Broadway for his roles in Glengarry Glen Ross and A Walk In The Woods and has appeared in movies such as Hoffa. But the real buzz for Cranitch is that The Price is not only a powerful play but said to be Miller’s most personal work.
“Even, those of us in the cast who are not native New Yorkers are slightly concerned we’re all going to end up like Officer Bibble or somebody!” he jokes. “But we are in good hands because Mark is such a great director and knows the play so well. And Miller is magnificent. This is very dense stuff, really powerful. But whether it’s personal to Miller or not, the theme of a reconciliation between two brothers also brings us into Cain and Able territory. Even though, obviously, it’s New York 1968. But I think it will be wonderful for an Irish audience because, by this stage, we are one of the United States. America is in our living room every night so it is something we understand. I mean, we probably know more about the geography of New York, because of Sex and The City, than we do of Dublin. Whereas if this play had been staged here in 1968 it might have seemed more alien to people.”
Lorcan plays Victor, one of the two brothers – a surgeon and a cop – who have been estranged for 16 years but come back together to dispose of their father’s belongings.
“The family furniture has to be sold off because they are tearing down the building that was the family home,” he explains. “And the brothers haven’t spoken for years so one of them has to sort all this out and has been trying to umpteen years to get in touch with his brother and failed. But the brother, who is the successful surgeon, hasn’t even bothered to get back to the brother who is the cop. So the character I’m playing is clinching the deal and the brother walks in and says ‘hi’ and that’s how the play kicks off.”
Anyone whose parent has died and has had to sell off the family heirlooms or divide them up between remaining relatives will relate to the tensions that follow in this play, even at that most fundamental level.
“In fact, there is nowhere that is more obsessed with family fortunes than this country,” says Lorcan, who shies away from revealing much more about the plot. He is, however, happy to talk about the fact that many of our readers might know him best from TV shows like Cracker. He has no time for theatre snobs who seem to automatically presume that stage as a medium for acting is somehow inherently better than TV or film.
“I think that is absolutely nonsense,” he says. “Some of the best writing is being done for TV on shows like Six Feet Under or The Sopranos. And there was stuff like Cracker, anything that Jim McGovern has written, which was great TV. And the point is that a lot of the stuff you see on TV these days is better than you see in movies, for example. Look at Robert Proskey’s work! Hill Street Blues? That was hugely innovative TV, a seminal ground-breaking programme that we all grew up on.”

The Price opens at the Gate on May 11, with previews from May 6