North Edinburgh Arts Centre and touring, May 2007

Fletcher Mathers who plays wheelchair-bound Sylvia.

BROKEN GLASS is what was scattered across the pavements after Kristallnacht in November 1938 when Jewish homes in Germany were ransacked by the Nazis. The horror of this “night of broken glass” resonates across the decades and with it a sense of guilt that more wasn’t done to halt Hitler’s anti-Semitic thuggery before it reached this terrible turning point.

For Sylvia Gellburg in Arthur Miller’s 1994 play, it feels like she’s the only one taking note of the American newspaper reports warning of the treatment of her fellow Jews in Germany prior to Kristallnacht.

She wants to do something about it, but everyone she knows is indifferent: her doctor, Harry Hyman, thinks the Germans are too cultured to tolerate this behaviour for long and her husband, Phillip, is too busy subsuming himself into American culture to dwell on his European Jewish heritage.

Sylvia’s impotence overwhelms her and, for no physiological reason, she becomes paralysed from the waist down. Twisting his story from the global to the domestic, Miller suggests that the real source of impotence and the true cause of Sylvia’s psychosomatic paralysis is her husband.

The playwright equates Phillip’s political neutrality with his sexual dysfunction, painting him as an ineffectual sap who lacks the guts to face up to his own moral and marital responsibilities. Only upon his death does Sylvia stand on her own two feet again, Miller appearing to imply that Germany’s Jews were crippled by their self-hating brethren in the USA.

It’s a contentious argument and one that fuels much of the play’s dramatic tension. The problem is that, unlike Miller’s great plays such as ‘All My Sons’, ‘The Crucible’ and ‘A View from the Bridge’, ‘Broken Glass’ never manages to step from the particular to the universal.

Instead of dramatising the big questions about culture, responsibility and assimilation that he is clearly dealing with, the playwright gets sidetracked by the medical mystery of Sylvia’s condition. The result is a play that is much more ordinary than its subject matter would imply.

In this production for Rapture Theatre, director Michael Emans fields two strong leads in Stewart Porter as Phillip and Lewis Howden as Dr Hyman, the two of them fighting for the affections of Fletcher Mathers’ wheelchair-bound Sylvia.

Designer Lyn McAndrew’s decision to place a double bed permanently centre stage, irrespective of the setting, restricts the playing space and rules out the possibility of movement. This tends to emphasise the more stagy aspects of the script, leading to a perfectly watchable but theatrically uninspiring production.

(Rapture Theatre’s Broken Glass can be seen at the Village Hall, Dervaig, Mull, 21 May; Village Hall, Craignish, 25 May; and Island Hall, Easdale Island, 26 May)

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• Rapture Theatre