Theatre - Broken Glass

When Arthur Miller was a teenager he lived along the street from a woman suffering from a mysterious paralysis. Apparently without cause, her limbs had suddenly seized up. The condition was eventually put down to a ‘hysterical reaction’. Almost seven decades later, Miller was to immortalise this episode in one of the last plays that he wrote for Broadway - ‘Broken Glass’. Set in 1938, New York, Sylvia Gellburg is the neighbour character who suffers a sudden attack of paralysis when news of the Kristallnacht pogrom hits the US papers. The condition becomes a thinly veiled analogy for America’s inertia at the beginning of the Second World War.

Victoria Thompson, club director of Lewes Little Theatre, is staging the production partly because of its contemporary resonances. “There was a strong anti-Semitic feeling in America at this time, which is not often talked about,” she tells me. “And given the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe and America today, we felt the subject to be particularly pertinent.” The company celebrate their 70th anniversary this year and Broken Glass is part of a programme of plays addressing themes of conflict and ethnicity. “With great humility, we are trying to promote an understanding of these events. In order to communicate, sometimes you need to walk in other people’s shoes”. Like the recent ‘Blood Wedding’, this production will feature a live musician (as dictated by Miller) playing a score specially written for the play. ER