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Socialist Review, September 1994

Lee Humber

Reviews
Theatre

No chance to walk away

 

From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Broken glass
by Arthur Miller

This is a brilliant play, a bitter attack on everything you’ve ever read that says the fascists aren’t really a threat.

It centres around a Jewish family and their doctor in New York in 1938, the year of the Kristallnacht, which marked the first night of the Nazi reign of terror against the Jews. Shocked by news of the pogroms filtering across to America, Sylvia Gellburg, long suffering wife of businessman Phillip, loses the use of her legs.

This personal tragedy sets off a train of events which leads all the play’s characters – including the socialist Dr Hyman brought in to treat Sylvia – to question what they held to be true about themselves and society generally.

The author shows how the compromises and unwritten agreements which day to day hold together personal relationships are tested in times of great social and political upheaval.

He looks at the oppression of Jews, at how, faced with anti-Semitism, many Jews in America as elsewhere were forced to subjugate themselves even to the point of denying their own Jewishness. Breadwinner Phillip is the main vehicle for this. Torn apart by his wife’s illness he goes through a terrible reappraisal of his own character.

But the core of the play is the rise of fascism and the consequences of ignoring it. All of the characters in the play – except for the paralysed Sylvia – underestimate the threat of the Nazis. Dr Hyman’s wife asks how can Sylvia be hurt by something happening thousands of miles away? Even the socialist doctor feels the Nazis can’t last and then has to admit after one particularly passionate outburst from Sylvia that he’s out of his depth. Only Sylvia truly senses the danger.

Since writing the play, Miller has discovered that there was in fact an unusual amount of physical paralysis among Jews in America during this period, while recent evidence shows a high incidence of hysterical blindness among Cambodian women following the horrors of the era of the Khmer Rouge.

But Sylvia’s physical paralysis is only a metaphor for the political paralysis of the other characters in the play – a cross section of the middle class – and, by implication, the political paralysis of the British and American governments. Sylvia poses the question, ‘What happens when you can’t walk away?’ Miller answers very clearly that you have to stand and fight or lose all.

The ways that social and political events influence personalities is brilliantly brought home by Miller. However, perhaps even more importantly the play hints at how human beings can start to change themselves, affect others around them and consequently start to influence political events. Appalled by what she reads and hears, Sylvia loses use of her legs but not her brain or her powers of speech. Her struggle to impress the danger of fascism on others deeply disturbs all of them, and forces them to reassess.

With the battle to defeat fascism still to be won, this play by one of the 20th century’s leading playwrights tells us to stand up and be counted.

Broken Glass is at the National Theatre, London


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