As Arthur Miller’s The Price plays its final weeks at the Marylebone Theatre, Faye Castelow talks to West End Theatre about playing Esther Franz, a woman at a crossroads, the danger of passivity, and why this quietly devastating play lands so close to home.
There’s a moment early in our conversation when Faye Castelow describes her character in The Price as “like a cat on a hot tin roof“: tightly coiled, waiting for something she can’t quite name. It’s a fitting image for Esther Franz, the wife of Victor and one of the most quietly complex roles in Arthur Miller’s body of work.
As Johnathan Munby’s acclaimed production plays out its final weeks at the Marylebone Theatre, Castelow has been relishing every minute of a character she calls “an absolute gift to play.“
The Price plays at the Marylebone Theatre until 21 June 2026. Book tickets here.
A woman at a crossroads
Esther, Castelow explains, is a woman caught in the gap between the life she imagined and the life she’s living.
“She’s in her late 40s… and I think she’s struggling with her identity. It feels like she’s been waiting her whole life to become something, become something else, and she finds herself stuck as a person that she almost doesn’t know herself.”
What makes the role so rewarding, she says, is precisely Esther’s refusal to be straightforwardly sympathetic. “She’s funny, unreliable, volatile, very dark sense of humour, and she’s in pain.” For Castelow, learning to embrace that unreliability has come with experience.
“As you get older… you start to be able to give up defending your character to the hilt for being perfect, like everyone else is wrong, but your character’s version of events is right. She’s an unreliable source at times, and I love that about her. I love getting to play someone that is just real, and she’s not having a great time, and she likes everyone to know about it.”
Victim or accomplice?
The Price is, at its heart, a play about what we sacrifice for family, and what we resent others for failing to sacrifice. Asked where Esther sits within that dynamic, whether she’s a victim of it or complicit in it, Castelow doesn’t hesitate: “Both. Categorically, both.“
It’s the central reckoning of the play, she explains. The three characters: two estranged brothers and Esther “all arrive at the story as the victim of their circumstances, and through this triangulation have to figure out that actually they have used that position to their own advantage, or to deny themselves the agency that they had in their lives.“
The way out, she suggests, is also the hardest thing any of them can do. “The path to freedom is by accepting that they were complicit in the decisions that they made. And they don’t always manage it.“
A pressure cooker in real time
The Price is a four-hander set almost entirely in a single room, unfolding in real time. It’s a contained, high-pressure environment that Castelow finds liberating rather than constraining. “We have the gift in this play of being in real time, essentially… we don’t come out of the chronology, we don’t come out of the time, and we don’t come out of the location.“
It’s Miller, she points out, so the work is all there on the page. “He’s a psychological master, it’s all there in the text, and you don’t have to add, you just have to nail the precision.“
Her approach, and the production’s, is to trust the writing completely: “Let the text do the work, just keep thinking quickly, and keep looking for the solution. Don’t sit in the emotion or look for the answer from somebody else.“
The physical staging reinforces that intensity. The set may be large, but it’s crammed with the furniture the brothers have gathered to sell, leaving the actors a playing space “really tight, even tighter than it looks when you’re on stage.“
The Miller play that gets left behind
The Price is staged far less often than Death of a Salesman, The Crucible or All My Sons, something Castelow has thought about. She suspects it’s down to its simplicity, and the fact that it covers family terrain Miller explored on a grander scale elsewhere.
“There were other broader, bigger, more dramatic expanses of the brothers reckoning with their past,” she says. But that simplicity, she argues, is exactly what gives the play its power.
“There is a universality to this in a way that you might not necessarily find in The Crucible. You don’t have to look hard at the subtext here… it’s very much what happens to siblings.“
That, she says, is what audiences respond to most. “What happens to siblings when their parents go, and what version of your childhood did you get? Your siblings can have very different parents, very different versions of their childhood.” The result is a play in which people “find themselves very easily.“
Knowing they had something special
The production has been warmly reviewed, but Castelow says the real moment of reassurance came with the first preview audiences. She’d always been confident that audiences would relish Henry Goodman’s Gregory Solomon “my fear was always… how much they get on board with the brothers and the dynamic, and if they could really get involved in a place that they could feel for everyone. And actually they rewarded us really quickly.“
The simple truth at the heart of The Price
What she hopes audiences take from it is something that clearly resonates with her personally: a warning about the cost of passivity.
“I hope that anyone recognises the damage that passivity can do in your life… that you have to seize an agency in your life, not just to get what you want, but to have the relationships that you want: to get everything that you can out of a marriage, a siblinghood, having a parent, being a child. It’s about taking action in your own life.”
And the play in three words? Castelow lands on “Funny, provocative, and sad.”
The Price plays at the Marylebone Theatre until 21 June 2026.
Words by Julianna Barnaby
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