THEATRE : Sharp shards

When Arthur Miller's Broken Glass opened at the National Theatre last August, critical reaction was divided. Set in 1938, the play focuses on the atrophied marriage of Philip, a self-hating Jewish property valuer, and his wife Sylvia, who has suddenly lost the use of her legs. This hysterical paralysis seems to be in part a withdrawal from the sterility of the marriage and in part a reaction to the newspaper reports of the Kristallnacht attacks on Jews in Nazi Germany. The critics disagreed over whether Miller had been successful in a characteristic effort to relate personal blight to public malaise. Did the connections ring true or were they an exercise in arrogating unearned significance?

On holiday when Broken Glass first opened, I have now caught up with the play in this West End transfer of David Thacker's National production, and my response sides overwhelmingly with the admirers. True, Miller seems to accord the wife an almost unique seer-like status in her anguished empathy with the Nazis' victims, and this fails to do justice to those of her fellow East Coast Jews who, by 1938, were neither ill-informed nor complacent about what was going on. But in exploring the psychological connections between the marriage and the wife's fears about matters less close to home, the play is both convincing and produces tremendous moral and emotional impact.

The link is the husband, Philip, who is portrayed by Henry Goodman in a quite superlative performance that communicates all his driven, self- despising anxiety to be the good little token Jew in the world of the goyim and his defensive touchiness over the sexual impotence that has withered his marriage.

The lack of self-esteem which you can feel gnawing Goodman from within underlies both the impotence and the anti-Semitism that is a rationalisation of his shame. Both have made Margot Leicester's wonderfully moving wife feel a profound insecurity, contributing to the way in which, on an unconscious level, she has begun to equate her husband with the Nazis. In David Thacker's fine production, with its glass wall, wilted trees and on-stage cellist, the uncovering of these connections skewers you into your seat in its harrowing embarrassments.

Some critics thought the doctor, a self-confessed amateur at psychiatry, was a convenience, there just to prevent an instant diagnosis. But Ken Stott's subtle performance suggests that this not unvirtuous, slightly suspect medic is there to dramatise another aspect of the problem.

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