Broken Glass

Broken Glass – The Young Vic

It is cheesy, and it may even be a cliché, to open my very first review with the story of the play that really made the world on stage click for me. It is, however, true.

I fell deeply, truly, madly in love with the theatre as a teenager studying for my GCSE English, and it was through the NT live streaming of Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge (directed by Ivo Van Hove).

I hungrily made my way through Arthur Miller’s most famous plays, seeing Death of a Salesman live at the RSC in Stratford the same year; watching The Crucible in as many of its adaptations as I could, and returning to my well-loved copy of All My Sons to mutter the monologues under my breath with a deep longing to see it live (which I finally did, in 2025!).

Broken Glass, however, was not a play I familiarised myself with in this period, kicking myself for being such a fraudulent self-proclaimed Miller aficionado when I saw that it was coming to The Young Vic this year.

A theatre that lends itself particularly well to a thrust stage, the setting is ambiguous. The soft furnishings, much like those of a waiting room, surround a half-made bed covered in newspapers. There are stacks and stacks of newspapers in pockets of space on the stage, a wide looking glass that spans the back wall, three clocks pinning the scene to three time zones, and a live goldfish doing laps of his bowl. The audience are sat on the very same sofas as the actors, and when the lights go down to encourage us to put away our noisy packets of chocolate buttons and ensure our glasses our comfortably lodged on our noses, the majority of the faces of the audience in the stalls are lit by the (very bright) stage lights. If there’s anything domestic about this space, it’s certainly not homely.

Set in 1938, we quickly realise that the subject of the newspapers that cover the stage are the events of Kristallnacht, from which the play’s title takes its influence (Kristallnacht was a night of extensive destruction on Jewish lives and Jewish property by the Nazis, and one of the most extensively and internationally documented atrocities worldwide). Philip Gellburg is visiting the office of his wife’s doctor, Dr. Harry Hyman, for advice on how to treat his wife Sylvia, who has become completely paralysed from the waist down. Philip is convinced that her obsession with reading the news of the attacks in Germany that has caused it.

Eli Gleb, who plays Phillip, is an absolute marvel. His rage is on the boil, gently tapping away on its lid from the beginning, the attempts to keep it from bubbling over futile, the blubbering mess it leaves behind reminiscent of the starchy pasta water that has extinguished the flame on your stove and coagulated on its surface. His relationship with his wife, as he tells it to Dr Hyman, is unravelled to be tense and unempathetic – not that you really ever believe him. Fuelled by a crippling lack of identity he is unable to connect to any of the other characters in a meaningful way. I felt honestly sorry for him, as you do with many of Miller’s leading men, for being his own worst enemy.

It is a timely (though harrowing) play to see in the rise of antisemitism in the UK today. Phillip repeatedly reminds us that he is G-E-L-L-berg (not Goldberg, a common Ashkenazi Jewish surname), and the crux of his damaging sense of self (or lack of) is his battle with his Jewishness. Sylvia’s paralysis is crucially explored as being a physical response to the violence being committed against people just like her, and the fact that everyone else seems numb to its going on. While the plot lacks some of the coherence and unity of some of Miller’s better-known plays, the performance brings it together as a fraught and unpredictable success. Really not one to miss.

Where to wet the whistle: 19 Lower Marsh, London SE1 7RJ

Where to grab a bite: The Anchor and Hope, 36 The Cut, London SE1 8LP