Broken Glass review – Arthur Miller’s shattering drama chills with new political resonance

Review Broken Glass review – Arthur Miller’s shattering drama chills with new political resonance Young Vic, London Jordan Fein’s revival finds hypnotic power in Miller’s 1994 play, as Pearl Chanda and Eli Gelb bring haunting emotional force to a story of paralysis and denial S ome might say that Arthur Miller’s 1994 play is less often staged for good reason. Broken Glass is about the unhappy marriage of a Jewish American couple in Brooklyn and also about America’s inaction in the face of rising Nazi terror. You see the play straining to tie those two parts together – and yet this production becomes hypnotic and horrifyingly resonant. It is 1938 and Sylvia Gellburg (Pearl Chanda) is a housewife whose legs suddenly, mysteriously, stop working after she reads about Kristallnacht in the newspapers. She is deemed a hysteric by her husband, Phillip (Eli Gelb) – a typical Miller man, outwardly able but nursing secret wounds and impotence – and a doctor (Alex Waldmann) labels her condition psychosomatic. Miller seems to be playing Dr Freud (or Dr Charcot) in his psychological exploration of Sylvia’s paralysis, yet he is intent on giving it bigger political symbolism too. The domestic tyranny in Sylvia’s marriage is likened to a larger oppression. The interweaving of the personal, political, social and sexual seems inchoate, but there is so much emotive power in Jordan Fein’s production, such extraordinary performances by Gelb and Chanda, and so many chilling parallels to current political indifference to the horrors around the world, that the play’s lack of internal coherence becomes irrelevant. Fein leans into the play’s messiness by employing a flamboyant kind of non-naturalism, from the glass screen behind which some characters glower at the drama on stage, to a central bed strewn with newspapers from 1938 and now. This part of the set, designed by Rosanna Vize to suggest a bedroom, waiting room and parliamentary chamber, is reminiscent of Cornelia Parker’s Left Right &...