BOOK & THEATRE REVIEW. ARTHUR MILLER’S BROKEN GLASS
On March the 8th 1997, I went to see this marvelous production at Manchester’s Library Theatre. The play proved to be a deeply moving, sometimes disquieting presentation. In Brooklyn, New York, 1938, Sylvia Gellberg reads a newspaper account of ‘Kristalnacht’ in Hitler’s Germany, 3,000 miles away. She is severely shocked by photographs of old Jewish men being forced to scrub the roads with toothbrushes, while armed Nazis watch, and laugh and civilians walk by as though nothing unusual or unpleasant is happening. A few days later, obsessively preoccupied with such images, and the indifference of other Jews she knows in Brooklyn to such atrocities, Sylvia inexplicably becomes paralyzed. There is nothing physically wrong with her. She simply loses the will to use her legs any more.
Her doctor, Harry Hyman, quickly diagnoses her malady as hysteria based trauma, which has as much to do with her husband, and events in her immediate life as with the rise of National Socialism. Dr. Hyman discovers that the husband, Philip Gellberg, has a few neurotic fixations of his own such as an obsession with wearing funeral black suits, and an angry reluctance to be called ‘Goldberg’ instead of ‘Gellberg’. Philip is proud of his unique success as a high-ranking Jewish real estate broker, and denounces other Jews for not succeeding as he has done. His lack of humour, his brutish, snappy impatience, and paranoiac intensity make Philip Gellberg immediately dislikable to the audience, but as the play progresses we are left with a realization that he is nevertheless a good man.
Dr. Hyman quickly realizes that Sylvia has come to see her husband as a Hitlerian Nazi figure, in his cold domination of her, and because of the occasional beatings he has given her in his more severe fits of rage. Advised by the Doctor to show more love, affection and tenderness, if not patience to his wife, Philip Gellberg tries, but fails to do so. Facing increasing recognition of his own impotence and weakness, he tries to hide it behind the fantastic lie that he made tender love to his invalid wife, but that she then rejected him by cruelly claiming to have forgotten the experience altogether within hours of its occurrence. Inevitably, the truth comes out in the Doctor’s ongoing investigation. The Gellbergs haven’t shared sexual relations or any kind of intimacy in twenty years.
Stephen Tindall’s performance as the Doctor is the play’s finest and most humanistic. His fascination for the case before him prevents him from referring the Gellbergs to better qualified psychiatric specialists, and his uncovering of the dreadful truth behind the lies and hysteria ultimately makes matters worse for the Gellbergs rather than better with tragic consequences. The play’s final fade out image is one that will lock in your mind forever.
Jonathan Oliver’s Philip Gellberg is a complex character played bravely, though his accent needs more work as it often lapses and slides around in the performance. Gradually the monster secures our sympathy as a man forced to face to bitterness and nastiness inside him. He begs the good Doctor to explain how he can be comparable to Hitler in his wife’s eyes. Hyman replies, offering Miller’s view that all oppressors and tormentors are act in that way from their own sense of being oppressed and tormented. (We see much of Philip’s torment through his relationship with his contemptible boss, Stanton Case, who sneers at Gellberg’s increasing domestic crisis and blames him for a business deal that has gone wrong). Hyman calls Hitler the classic case of the downtrodden man seeking an outlet for his inner hatred and finding it in the Jews. Hyman refers to Hitler as a man who rants and raves as though ‘He has an elephant standing on his pecker’. Hitler turned on the Semitic peoples of Europe, while in a smaller way, Gellberg turned on his wife as a way of running away from his own inner insecurity. By such interpretation, Miller makes us all see the potential to become Hitlers.
The highly informative programme for this play offers the following statement.
“A great deal more than glass is broken in this play. Society is at odds with itself; individual relationships are fractured. In Miller’s words, Broken Glass is concerned with ‘a public concern and a private neurosis’. The task is ‘to find that juncture where they actually meet’. On one level, they meet in the mind of a woman, shocked into paralysis. To understand the cause of her distress may thus be to understand, too, something of the greater failure of charity, of love, which it shadows.”
We see nothing of Nazi Germany in the play, though the theme of the rise of Nazism is a dominant one. Some of the lesser characters (i.e., Sylvia’s sister, Harriet) are aware of the problems that exist in the Gellberg household, just as many Germans failed to see the warnings of the impending atrocity machine that was Germany. Even the Doctor, the most levelheaded character in the play dismisses Nazism as a passing short-term trend of no serious threat to anyone. Sylvia Gellberg does recognize the true menace of what Hitlerism meant, but she is powerless to get her community to listen to her fears, and when her literal paralysis sets in, she is equally unable to walk away from her own oppression as well.
A television production of Broken Glass is due for screening at the time of writing this review, while a film version of Miller’s Salem Witch Trial play, The Crucible, is showing at regional cinemas.
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