TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Broken Glass
Tricycle Theatre Autumn 2010
Arthur Miller's 1994 drama is about the pain of living in a world of uncertainty and the fear of oppression.
His immediate subject is the experience of American Jews in the 1930s, but he explicitly extends what he has to say about them to anyone anywhere, as one character points out that every group has some other group they feel is oppressing them, and everyone feels that their life could be easier if they belonged to some other tribe.
Like many of
Miller's plays, this one may strike you as prosaic and heavy-handed as
you watch it, but is likely to linger and resonate in your memory and
emotions afterward.
A Jewish woman in
New York is so traumatised by early reports of Nazi attacks on Jews in
Germany that she becomes hysterically paralysed, unable to walk. Her
husband, whose pride at his assimilation is a thin veneer to his
unhappiness at being Jewish, can't understand her need to identify with
something so far away, and the Jewish doctor trying to help is
confounded by his own attraction to her.
Eventually the
story will prove more personal than political, with strains and secrets
within the marriage contributing to the pain of both husband and wife.
Soap opera was
never Miller's strong suit - the weakest element in Death Of A Salesman
is the revelation that Biff gave up on life after discovering his
father with another woman - and this play does threaten to get bogged
down in soppy psychosexual clichés. But it recovers, and convincingly
makes the point that the personal and political are inextricably
connected, and can contribute to a sense of being isolated and 'other',
and inadequate to cope.
Curiously, the
centre of the play is not really the paralysed woman, conceived by
Miller and played by Lucy Cohu with a stolidity that suggests that
willing herself into physical powerlessness is actually a relief from
her larger but more nebulous pains.
It is the husband
who goes on a journey of revealing and learning more about himself than
he had ever allowed himself to realise, and if - small spoiler alert
here - sexual impotence is a bit too obvious a symbol, the exposure of
the fear beneath his bluff is the most moving and engaging part of the
play.
Certainly Antony
Sher has an actor's dream role, with the opportunity to go from
buttoned-up coldness through bewilderment, fear, rage, despair and
self-discovery, and this sometimes very broad actor is most impressive
in the small and subtle touches by which he shows the man cracking and
collapsing.
Nigel Lindsay is
sympathetic as the doctor almost out of his depth both medically and
emotionally but still determined to do good, and there is strong
support from Madeleine Potter as his gossipy but insightful wife, Emily
Bruni as a supportive family member, and Brian Protheroe as the
husband's gentile boss, no more anti-Semitic than a man of his class
and time would be, which is to say very.
Iqbal Khan's
direction may get stuck in the soap opera from time to time, at the
expense of the play's larger human-condition observations, but he
manages to pull out of each trap the playwright has set, and draws
strong performances from the whole cast.
Gerald Berkowitz
(This production re-opened, largely recast, at the Vaudeville Theatre in 2011.
CLICK HERE for our return review.)
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Review - Broken Glass - Tricycle 2010
