HOW FAR AWAY MUST SUFFERING BE BEFORE WE ALLOW OURSELVES TO IGNORE IT?

By Lara Kennedy | LinkedIn ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Press Invite

At first glance, Broken Glass feels like an unusual choice for revival. Arthur Miller’s 1994 play is rarely staged compared to his better-known works, perhaps because its ambitions stretch in several directions at once: a crumbling marriage, a psychological mystery, and a political allegory about the rise of fascism. Yet Jordan Fein’s production at the Young Vic manages to transform that potential messiness into something unsettlingly hypnotic.

Fein’s staging leans fully into symbolism rather than realism. Rosanna Vize’s set centres on a bed surrounded by newspapers, existing somewhere between bedroom, hospital ward, and political arena, with the benches unavoidably imitating that of the Houses of Parliament. Behind a pane of glass, characters sometimes observe the action like silent witnesses. The effect is unsettling, as though the audience itself is being asked to watch history unfold from behind a barrier.

The most intriguing element of the set, however, is the wall of clocks marking different time zones. At first they feel decorative, almost arbitrary. But as the play progresses, they quietly become one of its most effective metaphors. The clocks begin misaligned, scattered across time and place, suggesting a world comfortably distant from the terror unfolding in Europe. Gradually, however, their alignment shifts. As the crisis abroad becomes morally closer to home, the clocks synchronise. By the time Phillip begins to acknowledge both the reality of fascism and his own Jewish identity, time itself seems to have collapsed the distance between Brooklyn and Berlin. The effect is immediate and powerful.

This slow tightening of the world around the characters makes the play feel disturbingly contemporary. Miller wrote Broken Glass during another period of rising global conflict, but its questions resonate sharply now. Watching characters debate whether distant suffering is truly “their problem” feels uncomfortably familiar amid today’s conflicts, particularly the ongoing devastation in the Middle East. Fein’s decision to mix historical and modern headlines reinforces this parallel: the past is not simply past.

At the centre of the production is Phillip Gellburg, and Eli Gelb’s performance is extraordinary. Miller often writes of men whose emotional repression becomes their downfall, but Gelb gives Phillip an unusual depth of fragility. His slow unravelling feels painfully human rather than merely symbolic.

One moment in particular stands out. As Phillip’s internal conflict finally erupts, the image is devastating, the noise deafening. Gelb performs it with such raw desperation that the theatre falls into stunned silence after the crash of noise. Sylvia’s paralysis may be the play’s central mystery, but Phillip’s psychological collapse becomes its emotional core and by far the stand-out scene.

If Broken Glass occasionally risks drowning in its own symbolism, Fein’s direction keeps the production gripping. The clocks, the glass panels, the newspaper headlines… each device pushes the audience toward the same uncomfortable question: how far away must suffering be before we allow ourselves to ignore it?

The answer Miller offers is bleak but necessary. Distance is often an illusion, and by the time we realise that the danger is closer than we thought, it’s often too late.

Broken Glass is running at Young Vic until Saturday 18 April.

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Photo Credit: Tristram Kenton