Review: BROKEN GLASS, Young Vic

Arthur Miller's later works are usually overshadowed by his earlier masterpieces. Is it time for reappraisal? With rising antisemitism across the world, what can Miller’s 1994 confrontation of anti-Jewish racism tell us in 2025?

Penned in 1994 Broken Glass revisits Brooklyn in 1938, where Jewish housewife Sylvia Gellburg is struck by a mysterious paralysis. Her workaholic husband Philip cannot work out why. According to Dr Hyman her condition is hysterical, born of horror at newspaper images of Jews being tormented on the streets of Nazi Germany in the aftermath of Kristallnacht.

Miller blurs the line between personal and the political, and the playwright’s penetrating gaze soon turns on the husband. Irascible Philip, captured in all his Technicolor complexity by Eli Gelb, is the only Jew in his New York property firm. Caught in a vortex of repression and self-hatred, he is desperate to sublimate his identity to appease his WASP boss, yet never quite able to do so. Every smug microaggression pierces another tiny hole in his heart, though he brushes it off with a plastic chuckle. In true Miller fashion he obsesses over his name: Gellburg, he insists, of Finnish origin, he claims. Not Goldberg.

Their bedroom becomes a microcosm of psychosexual friction. He is impotent. She will not sleep with him. Jordan Fein's production confronts us, but it’s unclear with what. Red carpet lines the walls and the bed cosy domesticity turned menacing, as though the home itself were haemorrhaging. Newspapers are bunched and scattered across the set. In Rosanna Vize’s set the boundary between the Gellburgs' Brooklyn interior and the streets of Berlin has dissolved. Scenes melt into one another; characters linger onstage long after their scenes have ended. Bright office lights are kept on for much of the show, washing the stage in a clinical glare and drawing half the audience into their torrid world.

Sylvia, gorgeously realised by Pearl Chanda, is Cassandra-like in her grief for German Jews, her foresight something the audience cannot help but share. "Where is Roosevelt?" she demands, blazing with indignation: "Where is England?" Alex Waldmann’s coquettish Dr Hyman, bats away her fears with breezy charm. The Germans, he insists, are a people of culture and music. They could not possibly descend into barbarity. The dramatic irony lands in one elongated punch in the face, and with about as much subtlety.

Miller’s interrogation of antisemitism isn’t not relevant, it’s just that the political symbolism is overcomplicated by its entanglement with sexuality making it hard to detect what best to glean from Broken Glass. In an age where horrors of war, barbarity, and terror and broadcast into our lives daily I wonder what could trigger the Sylvia’s paralysis in us today – but that is a question I ponder out of my own curiosity rather than something Miller and Fein urgently slaps us around the face with.

Broken Glass plays at the Young Vic until 18 April

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