glAss Iqbal Khan’s production, which ran at


the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn last year and this summer, is now at the Vaudeville Theatre. SirAntony Sher reprises his role as Phillip, having also played it earlier this year in a production at Cape Town’s new Fugard Theatre. Tara Fitzgerald joins him to play Sylvia. Miller’s take on Kristallnacht and the


approaching Holocaust is cleverly oblique. For most of these NewYork Jews, it is a story unfolding on a faraway continent. They have preoccupations of their own


ng other come yourself


Jh: it’s interesting that you say that, because…i saw your richard lll for example – i don’t know whether that was still at a time when you were coming to terms with your identity, but that was extraordinary to watch, that performance.


As: thank you. no, i wasn’t fully at ease with who i was at that stage! it’s taken years of psychotherapy and also just growing up, maturing and finding out about yourself and about human beings about our behaviour, that has led me in the end to celebrate who i am. i am these things and that’s what makes me me.


Jh:Well, richard lll was another outsider so i suppose you were still feeling like an outsider then.


As:Well, i will always be an outsider but that’s ok as well!


to hear the full interview go to www.jewishrenaissance.org.uk and click on Jr outloud


much closer to home but the effect of those disturbing images on Sylvia, the cause of her paralysis and its implications for her marriage, isMiller’s story. He is marvellously served here by


Iqbal Khan’s wonderfully cast spare production, which engages the imagination and lives long in the memory.With just two chairs, a bed and a wheelchair, plus translucent screens, designerMike Britton, working seamlessly with lighting designer Matthew Eagland, creates office, doctor’s surgery and bedroom. This exposes the actors of course, but they are so pitch perfect that it enhances their engagement with the audience and helps reveal the characters’ shifting relationships. The production’s trump card is one


dealt byMiller himself. His stage instructions call for passages of cello music to punctuate the action but he leaves it to individual productions to commission their own music. Grant Olding’s plangent evocative compositions, spine-tingling as interpreted by cellist LauraMoody, make these passages so much more than interludes. They give space, change mood,


move the story on.AndMoody with her cello, almost hovering in space above and behind the action, becomes a character in her own right. Olding’s music has delicate, almost ‘Jewish’ fall, but it’s suggestive rather than illustrative. Almost all ofMiller’s scenes are duets


– Sher’s Gellberg with his doctor, his boss, his wife; Sylvia Gellberg alone with her doctor, her sister. The duets suggest dance as well as music and even though she is largely chair and bed-bound, Fitzgerald has a lovely delicate movement quality, finely tuned to each of her interlocutors and suggesting the inner turmoil that has brought on her paralysis. Sher’s performance is extraordinary,


his Gellberg, the self-hating Jew, twists and turns to try and feel comfortable in his own skin and in relation to others, succeeding less and less as the action unfolds. By contrast, tall and elegant, Brian Protheroe’s Stanton Case, Gellberg’s non-Jewish boss, seems entirely at ease and in command. And Stanley Townsend as Dr Harry Hyman is a confident sexy man – everything Gellberg is not.


then and now eMMABonDor recalls the first time she saw broken Glass


I first saw Broken Glass when I was 16 years old, having recently returned from an intensive summer camp in Holland on the Holocaust where we were encouraged to “remember, tell and act”. I even wore my camp T-shirt to the performance. 16 years later I saw the play again. I sat on the other side of the theatre this time and it wasn’t the only change in perspective that the time and distance between the two viewings afforded me. I remembered the play as a powerful


call to action against injustice, of the need to voice the truth and say what you see; to “get up, stand up” as the marvellous Marley tells us. To my 16-year-old self, struggling with issues of Jewish identity and its relevance to my world, the play was also a difficult raising of consciousness about Jewish community, of recognising a connection to a tribe, ethnicity, history and nationhood that continued to confound me throughout my time at Oxford and into the working world. Re-viewing the play this time I was


more in awe of the woman who’d suppressed her voice in the name of love. Sylvia confides, “I realised I was stronger, swallowed it, believed I was weaker and now I’ve ended up useless just when he


needsmemost.” I wasmoved to tears by the manifestation ofmale fear as it turns to anger and control when faced with female beauty, wit, charmand intelligence. I wasmoved, too, to discover that I


long to belong. That Brooklyn’s allure to the doctor, who doesn’t need a ParkAvenue address to help people, is that of home, of haimishe pickles and people he understands. I realised too that I’d prefer not to know some of the things I have discovered along the way; not to have the flashbacks and distress which ten years in current affairs have unleashed onme. Because I’mstill stuck on Iraq andAfghanistan and the way I cutmy teeth on that particularmisguided ride through liberation and liberalism. I was envious of Sylvia when she said,


“there’s nothing I know now that I didn’t know 20 years ago, I just didn’t say it.” I’m also a little bit in love with the doctor, typifying health in themost Germanic of ways – horse-riding and sexually vigorous. He shares with Phillip the revelation that “a woman who feels unloved can feel disorientated and lost.” He also tells the ailing Phillip, whose heart condition is impaired in every sense, something that I needed to hearmyself, “Forgive; it’s the best thing for the heart”.


JeWish renAissAnce octoBer 2011 41


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