Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass is a really weird play. A lot weirder than official summaries tend to divulge. Which is impressive given that official summaries will tell you that it concerns a Jewish Brooklyn housewife who is inexplicably paralysed in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Germany’s 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom.
But that doesn’t touch the fact that Miller’s last big hit is a seething Freudian stew, spiced with Jewish guilt, a heady, occasionally surreal blend of desire and regret. Its protagonists are the paralysed Sylvia (Pearl Chanda) and her husband Philip (Eli Gelb), and while they’re middle aged - and director Jordan Fein seems to have intentionally cast actors too young for the roles as written - it’s hard not to view it through the lens of Miller having been in his late seventies and looking back with his own regrets when Broken Glass premiered in 1994.
The man had lived an extraordinary lifetime, and written extraordinary dramas. But he’d rarely explicitly written about either sex or Jewishness. Here he does both in a strange period piece that doesn’t conform to the thunderous classical tragedy of his most famous works. But certainly there is much about it that proves tragic, not least in Philip, whose fear of his own passions and heritage have led to a superficially successful but ultimately unfulfilled life.
The couple’s regrets are substantially tied to sex, although they struggle to articulate that until it’s slowly prised out of them by Harry Hyman (Alex Waldmann), a dashing bohemian doctor who has clearly read a bit of Freud in his time.
More complicated is their relationship to their own Jewishness, especially Philip. He’s a virtual wannabe WASP who prides himself on being the first Jew to work for his realtor employer. Although Miller was writing almost 60 years after this era, it’s one he’d have been able to remember, and he’s very good at uncomfortably raising the spectre of a more overtly antisemitic America. Philip talks about employers who won’t hire Jews; Harry is perplexed at the rise of the Nazis in part because he has fond memories of studying medicine in Germany, where he trained because (unlike the US) their schools didn’t have quotas on Jews.
There’s a lot going on, and rising star director Jordan Fein – in his first non-musical production in the UK – offers up an impressively bold production. Running at two hours without an interval, it takes place in a narrow strip of red-carpeted space in the middle of the theatre. Delineated by the front row of seats (which the cast often sit on), Rosanna Vize’s set is a mass of anachronistic details, from the noisily glugging water cooler to the aggressively synthetic ‘70s-style carpet that covers the floor and wall to the stacks of Metro newspapers in which Sylvie reads about Kristallnacht. A sort of recording studio-like glass booth sits at one end, with clocks displaying the time in New York, Berlin, London and Tokyo. With the cast in period-accurate costumes, I wouldn’t say it’s entirely obvious what the design is attempting to say: reflecting the yawning gap between when the play is set and when it was written? Or merely the timelessness of the themes? But certainly it’s immensely stylish, and it’s always great to see the hugely talented Vize letting rip.
Having injected a bit of edge into the classic musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Into the Woods, Fein certainly makes a solid first of the whole ‘visually led director’s theatre’ aesthetic. One nightmarish, Lynchian sequence in which Philip has a breakdown is phenomenal.
But despite a couple of brilliant moments I can’t help but feel the surprising longevity of Broken Glass comes down to it being more of an actors’ play than a directors’ one. Yes, it’s weird. But it has three very meaty roles in Sylvia, Philip and Harry.
Chanda, in particular, is terrific here, both earthy and adrift as a woman who is more horrified by the world than her condition. In one brilliant exchange her and Philip argue at total cross purposes, him shouting about the state of their marriage, her howling about Nazi Germany, each oblivious to the other. I did find myself slightly distracted by whether Fein meant anything by casting a 33-year-old actor in the role of a woman who we’re told gave birth 20 years ago. As with a lot about this production, there’s a nagging sense that it might mean something I’m not getting, but also the possibility that he just cast her because she’s cool.
Waldmann is good, with a free spirited intensity that’s utterly charming, but leaves you fairly confident Harry is way out of his depth and doesn’t know what he’s doing in any way. Gelb’s mannered, tragic clown turn as Philip is where things get shakier: he never seems vulnerable and human enough, and perhaps again a little young.
The last time Broken Glass hit the London stage in 2011 it had a monumental turn from Antony Sher as Philip; on its debut it was the great Henry Goodman in the role. Gelb doesn’t really offer their humanity or gravitas but it’s not quite what he’s being directed to do either. A fascinating and fitfully brilliant production of a fascinating and fitfully brilliant play, but Broken Glass needs to be handled a bit more delicately than The Crucible et al.
