American director Jordan Fein has been busy. Having burst onto the London stage with a landmark revival of Fiddler on the Roof he took a sabbatical from Jewish subject matter (though not Jewish creatives) with a triumphant revival of Into the Woods, Sondheim and Lapine’s grown-up take on Grimm fairytales.
No sooner has that run ended at Bridge Theatre he is back at a different London stage with Arthur Miller’s late and most explicitly Jewish work. It is staged relatively rarely compared to Miller’s major plays which include Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View From the Bridge.
But more than any other play of his – and possibly anyone else – Broken Glass is the work that most directly delves into the condition of being Jewish.
It does this most explicitly after its dramatic climax in which two very different Jews – one coiled and self-hating, the other calm and worldly – philosophically discuss the subject of being Jewish like a couple of alte kakers on a park bench.
To see this discussion in which Phillip Gellburg – the self-hater – asks, “Why is it so hard to be a Jew?” take place on a major stage at a time when being Jewish is the most precarious it has been this century, lends the play an urgency not seen since 1994 when it premiered in this revised form after its New York debut.
We are in Brooklyn in 1938. For nine days the legs of Phillip’s wife Sylvia have been mysteriously paralysed. In desperation Phillip seeks answers from the local, much-admired Doctor Hyman who can find no physical reason for the illness. He suspects it is psychological. Could it, wonders Phillip, have anything to do with Sylvia’s obsession with the news coming from Germany?
Hyman agrees but he also sees that Sylvia’s problem is connected to Gellburg himself. Sylvia’s husband has the bearing of a funeral director, wears a black suit like the most orthodox of Jews yet is at pains to correct anyone who mistakes his name for Goldberg so keen is he to distance himself from his heritage. “We’re from Finland originally,” he unconvincingly maintains.
Rosanna Vize’s set of a red carpeted thrust stage overlooked by clocks giving the time differences across the globe is an effective if somewhat puzzling design. But it allows Fein to allow his cast to be present even when they are not in a scene, a little like the downright brilliant New York production of Oklahoma! seen on this stage in 2022 which Fein co-directed.
American actor Eli Gelb seen previously in Stereophonic captures the punishing state of being Jewish and hating every second of it. Alex Waldmann as the more worldly and wise Jew, Doctor Hyman also does excellent work, the default calm of his Hyman becoming shredded by Phillip’s explosive anxiety.
There is also good work from Nancy Carroll as Hyman’s wife Margaret, a Minnesotan belle. But it is Pearl Chanda as Sylvia who ignites the play’s simmering potential.
Haunted by news of Kristallnacht and newspaper pictures of elderly Jewish men being forced to clean German pavements with toothbrushes, Chanda’s paralysed Sylvia exudes a deep disquiet about both her marriage and the news from Germany. We know that Hyman sees she “is connected to some truth that other people are blind to”. But when it is fully revealed the stage almost combusts as Chanda’s Sylvia releases her full terror of the coming Holocaust.
Broken Glass
Young Vic
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