'Broken Glass' review — striking revival of Arthur Miller's 1994 play

Read our review of Broken Glass, now in performances at the Young Vic to 18 April.

Summary

• Pearl Chanda; Nancy Carroll and Eli Gelb star in Arthur Miller's 1994 play Broken Glass
• The play is set during the Nazi's rise to power
• Performances continue at the Young Vic through 18 April

Arthur Miller’s 1994 play Broken Glass is generally considered the strongest of his later works. Having made an impression with the musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Into The Woods, director Jordan Fein’s combative production of this claustrophobic, sexually charged piece doesn’t make a case for it as an equal to Miller’s earlier masterpieces – it’s too meandering and repetitive – but it has got several striking qualities with present-day resonance.

This is historical fiction located in a period of history that the author lived through. Set in Brooklyn in 1938, the play follows Sylvia Gellburg (Pearl Chanda), a Jewish housewife, who suddenly finds herself paralysed. She is unable to look away from the attacks on European Jewry that are being illustrated in the newspapers but no one else in her Jewish community is particularly perturbed: it’s happening on another continent, those Nazis won’t last, and their influence couldn’t possibly spread to America.

The play comprises a triangle between Sylvia, her husband Phillip (Eli Gelb), and the suave neighbourhood physician Dr Harry Hyman (Alex Waldmann), who takes on Sylvia’s case himself instead of referring her to a trained psychiatrist. Hyman digs for details about the couple’s sex life, and receives contradictory accounts, but it’s clear that the marriage isn’t a happy one.

The frustrated intelligence, delicacy, and otherworldliness of Chanda’s Sylvia is contrasted with the bullish, scowling physicality of Gelb’s Phillip. He is proud to be the only Jewish employee at a leading mortgage company (even though he’s mostly there to do the dirty work despite his impressive-sounding title) and boasts that his son at West Point military academy could be America’s first Jewish general, but he would like to be fully assimilated. However, he can’t hide his Jewishness due to the way he presents (“Being a Jew is a full-time job”, he observes).

In contrast, Waldmann’s Hyman wears his Jewish identity lightly and is educated, a skilled horseman, and a womaniser. It probably isn’t the first time he’s overstepped the professional line with a patient, his status granting him access that a spouse is denied. Nancy Carroll is underused as Hyman’s garrulous, non-Jewish Minnesota-born wife with a laugh that could be heard five blocks away.

For much of the production, the audience is confronted with the house lights up, as with Oklahoma! at the same venue, which Fein co-directed (lighting design by Adam Silverman). The house visits between Sylvia and Hyman are illuminated by softer, romantic lamplight, almost encouraging an inappropriate relationship between doctor and patient. There are no scene changes, suggesting an overlap of conversations and ideas, and Phillip, when he isn’t part of the action, is simmering in corners.

With a quasi-expressionistic set design by Rosanna Vize, the production is staged in horseshoe formation with a small stage area covered in shag-pile carpet. Fein employs various motifs about time, not all of which are entirely successful. The clocks on the wall are set to different international time zones but all show the same time by the end. Chanda and Gelb look about a decade too young to have a 20-year-old son, even taking into account an early marriage – perhaps this is a comment on the couple’s arrested development but it doesn’t quite land. Piles of newspapers spanning decades of history are stacked around the stage indicating the compulsion of a hoarder, and a goldfish in a bowl is a candid metaphor for Sylvia’s restricted mobility.

In an age of 24-hour news and constant horrors around the world, it is often difficult to judge how much to consume. “Everyone is persecuted but no one will admit to being a persecutor” observes Hyman at the end. Especially so if trapped in one’s own head.

Broken Glass is at the Young Vic to 18 April. Book Broken Glass tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Broken Glass (Photos by Tristram Kenton)