THEATRE Conflicted identities


Broken Glass TRICYCLE THEATRE, KILBURN, LONDON


before the age of 40, their later years often painful and unproductive, especially in America where production is predominantly commercial: Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, Broadway’s darlings of the period around the Second World War, subsequently became used to their work being rejected or staged elsewhere. One Miller work that was treasured in England after neglect in the US – Broken Glass, which won praise and prizes here in 1994 – has just received its first major British revival and is confirmed as a considerable late work. Written when Miller was almost 80, it is perhaps the best play by a senior American dramatist apart from Edward Albee’s The Goat. In the way that late work often will, it synthesises the central concerns of Miller’s writing career: the condition of being Jewish, the shadow of the Holocaust and the limita- tions of masculinity and commerce. Broken Glass takes place in New York in 1938, as The New York Times reports the events in Germany of Kristallnacht, the destruction of Jewish property that heralded the Second World War and the death camps. Sir Antony Sher, in a performance of typical physical and psychological detail, is Phillip Gellburg, a successful Wall Street financier who specialises in foreclosing on properties their owners can no longer afford, a topicality which has probably helped to prompt the re- examination of this play. Crucially, the only Jew employed by his firm and with a son who holds the same distinction among the officer class of the US army, Gellburg seems to be the success that Willy Loman wasn’t in Death of a Salesman but turns out to suffer all the insecurities and per- secutions of Miller’s iconic character. Mysteriously, his wife, Sylvia (Lucy Cohu), has suddenly been afflicted with paralysis, declaring herself unable to get out of bed. Her neighbourhood physician, Dr Harry Hyman (Nigel Lindsay), influenced by the modish theories of Freud, believes that Sylvia’s illness is “hysterical” and may be caused by her horror


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he history of theatre shows that play- wrights tend to have their biggest hits


Antony Sher and Lucy Cohu in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass


with Lindsay, effortlessly captures both the vocal delivery and body language of the New Yorkers they are. Mike Britton’s design picks up on the layering in the central character by using sliding, diaphanous screens to divide the action. Behind one of them, at the rear of the stage, the cellist Laura Moody plays live between scenes the affecting and atmospheric music of Grant Olding: a clever touch which


at what is happening to the Jews in Germany, although, were Freud to have psychoanalysed the doctor, he would surely have concluded that, subconsciously at least, his interest is in keeping Sylvia in bed, for a kind of therapy forbidden to the medical profession. Gradually – in tight, ambiguous exchanges showing that Miller’s facility with dialogue and structure remained intact even this late on – it becomes clear that the problems stretch much further back into the couple’s marriage and that, indeed, it may be Gellburg himself who has more need of medical help as, at the play’s climax, becomes the case. Sher is magnificent at projecting initially the confidence and assurance of Gellburg and then the gulfs underneath and, in common


RADIO Laddie be couth


He Belonged to Glasgow: the Will Fyffe Story BBC RADIO 4


uite the funniest part of this feature (4 November) for Radio 4 was the series of cover versions of the subject’s signature tune (“I belong to Glasgow/Dear old Glasgow town/But there’s something wrong with Glasgow/It’s going round and round”). These included renditions by Hughie Green, Danny Kaye, Ronnie Corbett, Lulu and – most implausibly of all – the 1967 Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup Final squad. The number’s appeal to a modern audience was further con- firmed by the presenter, Ricky Ross, who played a tape of his own band, Deacon Blue, performing it in front of an audience of several thousand Glaswegian twentysomethings. Dr Johnson remarked that much may be made of a Scotsman if he be caught young. Even more can be made of him if he can be persuaded to adapt his Scottishness to fit the demands of the English market. Will Fyffe (born 1885) was an exponent of what the early- twentieth-century variety-hall cognoscenti knew as “couthy” (i.e. “cosy”) comedy, second


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links the play with the Miller script with which it is most thematically twinned – Playing for Time, about the Jewish orchestra that per- formed in Auschwitz. This staging – which clearly marks its young


director, Iqbal Khan, as a talent to watch – is the latest impressive production at the Kilburn Tricycle Theatre, which, as it receives major funding from Arts Council England and Brent Council, is a perfect example of the kind of venue which is at risk of a double funding jeopardy through the recent cuts to both arts funding and local government budgets. The possibility that such a place might suffer reduced capabilities is a warning of what is at stake for culture as the cuts bite. Mark Lawson


only in the public’s estimation to Harry Lauder. (Lauder got the knighthood, while Fyffe had to make do with a CBE for his war work.) The two became friends, although Fyffe’s first attempts at performing his own sketches used material that Lauder had pre- viously turned down.


Born in Dundee, and technically not belong- ing to Glasgow at all, Fyffe served a tough late-Victorian apprenticeship in the Scottish “geggies”, or portable theatres, where lines of dialogue were liable to be snuffed out by the sound of the steam organ playing in the next- door tent. Subsequently he graduated to the local variety circuit, at this point a vehicle for mass entertainment that, in terms of popular take-up, would only be superseded by tele - vision. In the 1920s, for example, there were two dozen theatres in Glasgow, each of them employing between eight and 10 acts a night and supporting an industry of several thou- sand people. One of the peculiarities of “couthy comedy”,


at any rate to a modern ear, is that it wasn’t especially funny. Lauder’s surviving patter sounds painfully thin. Fyffe himself told time- honoured jokes about Scotsmen who came back from extended foreign trips to discover that their brothers had grown beards, on the grounds that “you took the razor with you”. Another drawback was the difficulty of export- ing sketches delivered in broad Scottish accents. English audiences found Scottish


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