Escapism? Not on your life
Theatre that can't help but cut through, and more to see in London
That a play written in 1994, and set in 1938 as the reports of Kristallnacht filter through to New York’s newspapers, should feel so horribly relevant now is depressing in the extreme.
What I’ve seen
It’s hard to know what prompted the then-79 year-old Arthur Miller to write Broken Glass, half a century after the events, but you can imagine that one of the play’s main themes – humanity’s reluctance to contemplate or confront its own apparently endless capacity for inhumanity – weighed pretty heavily on that generation.
Miller would have been 23 or thereabouts when reports started coming across the Atlantic of the wanton destruction of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, with papers running confronting photographs of elderly Jewish men, surrounded by jeering mobs, being forced to clean the pavement with toothbrushes.
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It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection to today – we are more informed than we’ve ever been; we know full well what horrors we are capable of; we can now see them happening almost in real time. And yet, we fail consistently to fully grasp it.
Jordan Fein’s new production, at the Young Vic until April 18, leans into the play’s obvious relevance by teasing out strong, naturalistic performances from his excellent cast and strewing contemporary newspapers all over Rosanna Vize’s curious, highly stylised pink-carpeted set.
