Broken Glass: A Play in Two Acts: Revised (Penguin Plays) - Softcover

Miller, Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140249389 ISBN 13: 9780140249385

Publisher: Penguin, 1995

Synopsis

Paperback

About this title

Review:

'What a fascinating play this is.' Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010 'A late masterpiece from Arthur Miller, written in 1994 when he was 79, it takes two mighty strands, anti-Semitism and sexual neurosis, and weaves them into a beguiling, unsettling whole.' Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010 'Once the issue of the Gellburgs' (lack of) sexual relations is thrown in, Miller craftily sets us wondering which one of Phillip or Sylvia is actually the more disturbed.' Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard, 11.10.2010 'The"broken glass" of the title of Arthur Miller's 1994 play refers in part to the shattered window panes of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany. But the title has other resonances, too. Glass, once splintered, cannot be put back together. Running through the play is the question of whether something badly broken can ever be repaired: a marriage, an identity, a country. Miller ties the personal and the political together, as a Jewish couple living in 1930s New York react to the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in Germany in different ways.' Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, 09.10.10 'Miller mixes the personal with the political with incredible skill. He places ideas about identity, assimilation, self-hate and self-acceptance into a story that grips like a thriller.' Dominic Maxwell, The Times, 08.10.10 'Can a distant atrocity affect a person so much they become paralysed? Arthur Miller's 1994 psycho-sexual drama ponders this question as Sylvia, a middle-aged Jewish woman in 1930s Brooklyn, is stricken with paralysis just as Hitler's brownshirts are rampaging in Germany.' Claire Allfree, Metro (London), 12.10.10 'Miller wrote this lugubrious, complex play in 1994, but he remembered the inter-war years, and the casual references to American anti-Semitism are more shocking than Sylvia's wasted life or Philip's curdled feelings for his people.' Nina Caplan, Time Out (London), 14.10.10 'Arthur Miller's only full-length play to deal with his own and every other Jew's Jewishness' John Nathan, Jewish Chronicle, 15.10.10 'It's a simple tale of marital grief. An American Jewish woman [...], hearing of the Kristallnacht atrocities, has become paralysed from the waist down. The quest for a cure takes her and husband, Philip Gellberg, to the deepest and darkest vaults of their stagnant marriage. Gellberg is one of Miller's great creations. An ambitious and capable financier, he has vaulted Wall Street's invisible barriers of prejudice and become second-in-command at a venerable old bank. But he remains pathetically grateful to the anti-Semites who employ him. He boasts, with genuine pride, that he's the first Jew to set foot on his boss's yacht. Yet he hates himself. He loathes his Semitic face and the suspicion it arouses among his colleagues.' Lloyd Evans, Spectator, 16.10.10 'its ambiguities are haunting' Jane Edwards, Sunday Times, 17.10.10 'The lesson the couple learns, though tragically too late, is to rise above incapacitating fear and guilt.' Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 17.10.10

About the Author:

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock. He has also written two novels, Focus (1945), and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. More recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season, and Mr. Peter's Connections (1998). His latest book is On Politics and the Art of Acting. Miller was granted with the 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140249389
• ISBN 13: 9780140249385
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144