Broken Glass, Tricycle

Superb cast lift ponderous late Arthur Miller work

by Veronica LeeFriday, 08 October 2010

Antony Sher and Lucy Cohu: Caught in a sexless marriage in 'Broken Glass'Tristram Kenton

We are in Brooklyn in 1938 and Sylvia Gellburg, a middle-class Jewish housewife, is paralysed from the waist down. It’s a hysterical paralysis brought on by the shock of seeing newspaper pictures of the cruelty meted out to German Jews during the horrors of Kristallnacht (or the night of broken glass). She becomes obsessed with a picture of two elderly Jews forced to clean the pavement with toothbrushes - events several thousand miles away have caused the sudden numbing of her limbs. Or is it something else?

‘This is a bed, we realise, that has seen very little service beyond being where two people have slept in their 20-year marriage’

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