Last Updated on March 4, 2026
Arthur Miller’s play resonates with our times
4.0 out of 5.0 starsArthur Miller’s Olivier award-winning play, Broken Glass, does not appear regularly on the London stage. It played at the National Theatre in 1994, at the Tricycle (now Kiln) in 2010 and in Watford in 2018. The current run at Young Vic is bookended by the brilliant production of Miller’s All Our Sons, ending this week at the Wyndham, and The Price opening at Marylebone Theatre in April. Despite it being considered one of Miller’s lesser plays, this production, directed by Jordan Fein (Fiddler on the Roof, Into the Woods) is well worth booking for.
Broken Glass tells the story of an American woman, Sylvia Gellburg (Pearl Chanda), living in Brooklyn in 1938, who has become obsessed with reading newspaper reports of the violent attacks on the Jewish community in Germany. The title of the play refers to the events known as Kristallnacht, when Jewish shops, synagogues and institutions were set alight and destroyed in an orgy of anti-semitic violence. Unable to look the other way as many around her do, Sylvia suddenly develops paralysis and loses her ability to walk.
Her husband, Phillip (Eli Gelb), takes her to see Dr Hyman (Alex Waldman), who believes that this is a hysterical paralysis. The doctor is fascinated by this case but soon finds himself out of his depth, blurring the boundaries between his medical treatment and his growing desire for his patient. As he encourages Sylvia to open up, she is slowly able to talk about issues in her marriage which have been repressed for twenty years. Meanwhile, Phillip’s world begins to fall apart, a combination of his angry and fearful reaction to his wife’s condition, and stress at work, where he loses the confidence of his demanding boss, Stanton Case (Nigel Whitmey). His outer carapace starts to crack, and repressed anxieties rise to overwhelm him.
Broken Glass is an uncomfortable and passionate play that explores the consequences of disconnecting with real life. This is a particularly pertinent play for our times, where new wars and violence appear in visceral detail on our screens all too regularly, and anti-semitism has resurged to its most virulent level in decades. Yet, Broken Glass is not simply a play about Nazi Germany. It draws the link between the explicit anti-semitism unleashed in Europe and a more insidious type of anti-semitism on American soil, where, as Philip has experienced, there are firms that do not hire Jews. When Dr Hyman naively says of the anti-semitic violence in Germany, ‘this will pass’, the audience knows only too well that Kristallnacht was the early stages of a genocide that was beginning to unfold.
Broken Glass is an astute and penetrating psychological drama. It skillfully draws parallels between international politics and the politics of a marriage. When Sylvia’s sister Harriet (Juliet Cowan) calls Philip ‘a dictator’, Miller reveals the mind of a man who is a self-hating Jew and whose sexual dysfunction has led him to project his inner fears and shame into his marriage. Hitler’s hatred of Jews becomes confused in Sylvia’s mind with her husband’s self-loathing, and her long-lived fear of Philip bursts forth into physical form.
She is, one might say, literally paralysed with fear and rage. She admits that she has thrown away her life for twenty years, not wanting to confront or shame her husband (whose sexual problems are related to his poor self-esteem). She talks about having allowed ‘the grave to close over her’ and finally, in becoming paralysed, she finds the strength to fight back and find her voice. Yet she continues to be paralysed to stop the humiliation and violence towards Jews in Nazi Germany, from which she refuses to look away as those around her do.
The play explores what it is to be Jewish and was the first time that Miller wrote explicitly about his own struggle with his Jewish identity. His characters discuss whether Jewish people should assimilate or keep separate, hide their identity or display it. But Broken Glass does touch more broadly on questions of identity and persecution.
At one point, Dr Hyman opines that all groups in society feel persecuted by some other group. Yet this is not to deny the anti-semitism that the play deals with. In fact, both Phillip and Dr Hyman have their heads in the sand about what is unfolding in Nazi Germany, with the doctor unable to accept that the cultured people he met while studying in Heidelberg could turn a blind eye to or perpetrate the horrors that are reported in the American press. The play is uncomfortably resonant in our times. One of the scenes of Philip beginning to scrub the floor with a toothbrush (as Jews were forced to do in central Berlin) is particularly shocking.
Despite Sylvia and Philip being cast as younger than the middle-aged characters in the script, performances are excellent all round, including the smaller roles of Harriet and Dr Hyman’s long-suffering wife, Margaret (Nancy Carroll). As a semi-paralysed woman, Chanda had a challenging task as she was either seated or supine on the bed for most of the performance. A particularly standout performance was given by Eli Gelb as Philip, whose buttoned-up anger and repressed emotion made him an unlikable character. Unable to express his hidden anguish, his body speaks for him as his brooding character performs a series of nervous and somewhat unnerving twitches. He develops from a seething, angry bully to a vulnerable man, lost in his unresolved identity crises and his inability to live without the love of his wife. The rivalry between Philip and Dr Hyman is also well performed and is sensitively portrayed as they talk and physically circle one another on the marital bed.
Broken Glass runs to two hours without an interval, but Fein keeps it galloping along. Towards the end, it does become repetitive at times, but this is a problem with the script rather than the direction. The play is performed in the round, which increases a sense of intimacy. The rectangular set (Rosanna Vize) is red with a glass window (unbroken) on the back wall, above which four clocks are set to different time zones, which finally all show the same time. A goldfish swimming around in a fishbowl is a nice touch. Is this a comment on how easily we forget or how the same scenario keeps playing out again and again? The use of the set required no scenery changes, rather using lighting (Adam Silverman) to illuminate different parts of the space that became either the doctor’s office or the various rooms of the Gellburg home.
The music (Tom Gibbons) hums constantly in the background, adding to the rising tension, reaching a deafening climax at a point where Philip explodes both emotionally and physically. His emotional distress is also expressed through illness, which threatens his very survival. Miller makes explicit the dangers of repressed emotion, of not speaking out, both in intimate relationships as much as in our turning away from what is wrong in the world around us, even if what is playing out is not on our own shores.
Broken Glass runs at the Young Vic from 20 February – 18 April 2026
Young Vic, 66 The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1 8LZ
Check out our London Theatre Previews, January – July 2026 – Off West End
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