4 March 2026

Broken Glass review: Jordan Fein’s slick directing saves Arthur Miller’s difficult play

A moving revival at the Young Vic emphasises the paralysing feeling of watching horror unfold abroad

Sylvia Gellburg can’t get up. For most of Broken Glass, she’s slumped in bed, or crawling around the arena stage at the Young Vic, unable to move her legs. Everyone wants to know why.

Arthur Miller wrote Broken Glass in 1994, which is about a Jewish-American woman living in Brooklyn on the brink of the Second World War in 1938. She loses control of her lower body while obsessively consuming news about Nazi Germany. The play received largely negative reviews when it premiered in Connecticut 32 years ago and has rarely been performed since. Yet, Jordan Fein, who directed the acclaimed Into the Woods at the Bridge Theatre last December, has staged a punchy and moving production, which mostly outweighs the occasional didacticism in the text.

Gellburg, played by a charming if rather English-sounding Pearl Chanda, sees physician Dr Hyman (Alex Waldmann) hoping he can fix her. (Apparently Hyman was based on a real doctor, Ralph Greenson, who tended to Miller’s unravelling wife, Marilyn Monroe). Hyman is immediately attracted to his patient but believes her paralysis is “hysterical”, stemming from unresolved mental pain. There are two causes for that pain: Adolf Hitler and her husband, Phillip.

Phillip Gellburg (not Goldberg, as he obsessively reminds people) is a Jewish Republican who hates his Jewishness. He’s ashamed of his Jewish face and being looked down on by his Wasp-y boss. He thinks German Jewish refugees should be more grateful to have jobs in America. Sylvia dreams of him mutilating her at night.

Unlike the receding forest of Into the Woods, the set, designed by Rosanna Vize, is simple: a bed, a few chairs, a glass screen through which characters occasionally watch the action. The walls and carpet are covered in red velvet and stacks of newspaper lie on the floor. In the sections set in the doctor’s office, harsh house lights reveal the audience. A real goldfish swims furiously in a fishbowl.

Like many of Miller’s plays, Broken Glass efficiently sets up the tension and intimacy between the Gellburgs in the opening minutes. Phillip, brilliantly played by Eli Gelb, knows he’s to blame for his wife’s immobility but can’t stop shouting at her. She, meanwhile, is mourning her decision to dispose of her life at 20 when she married him. “Gave it away like a couple of pennies,” she says. “I took better care of my shoes.”

It is, however, an imperfect script. The character of Dr Hyman allows Miller far too much space for exposition. In long speeches diagnosing the Gellburgs, Hyman explains Phillip’s self-hatred and Sylvia’s buried trauma with a highly unrealistic level of insight. It’s a shame that the two most dramatic moments of the play occur twice, in the middle and at the end of the performance, knocking the wind out of the predictable final moments. Still, Fein’s slick direction makes Broken Glass a poignant and timely exploration of the numbing feeling of watching slaughter abroad and doing nothing.