Ancient Greek playwrights at the Festival of Dionysus were required to submit a comedy alongside a tragic trilogy. A comic coda was always necessary to wash down the dramatic devastation that had preceded it. For them, tragedy and comedy were not warring opposites but two instruments probing the same wound from different angles. Tragedy slices you open and comedy stops the bleeding. One without the other was incomplete.
The Young Vic’s current revival of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play Broken Glass and Howard Jacobson’s latest novel Howl seem at odds. One is a tragic portrait of desperate denial in the shadow of Kristallnacht in 1938, the other a dark comedy that unravels the absurdity of socio-political fault lines in present day London. The same question lies coiled at the heart of both: how do Jews process, survive, and make meaning of the antisemitism that is again becoming eerily ubiquitous?
Broken glass has a deep resonance in the Jewish psyche. At the end of a wedding ceremony, the groom stamps on a glass, its shattering symbolizing the fate of the Temple in Jerusalem. The melancholy of destruction and exile haunts us even at the happiest moment of our lives. Then there’s the broken glass of Kristallnacht, the opening salvo of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by Nazi paramilitaries — and it’s that image that lingers in the backdrop of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play of the same name.
In Broken Glass, Sylvia Gellburg, a Brooklyn housewife in 1938, wakes to find her legs paralyzed with no physical cause to be found. She has been reading the news obsessively, unable to look away from stories of anti-Jewish violence from Germany. Her paralysis, her doctor diagnoses, is psychosomatic, her body symbolically absorbing the collective trauma that American Jews around her choose to ignore.
But Miller resists cookie-cutter moralities. He suggests something more multifaceted. Sylvia’s husband Philip is a self-hating Jew, proud of being the only Jewish employee at his firm, but secretly longing to sublimate his Jewishness and blend into WASP New York. He would rather not be Jewish at all. All the while, Sylvia’s paralysis becomes the symbolic expression of a community that cannot contend with its inability to recognize and stop its own persecution. Barbarism begins at home.
“The melancholy of destruction and exile haunts us even at the happiest moment of our lives.”
Theater’s greatest strength is always its audiences. There is no mediation, no screen to look away from or book to clasp shut if things get too intense. We cannot help but be confronted by what we watch. We are in the same room, breathing the same oxygen as the world conjured before us. But it is a two-way street. All the background noise melting in our minds from our daily lives echoes onto what we see on stage. It is what allows us to revisit and revive plays year after year, finding new meanings in what we watch. As the world changes, so does the art.
There is usually a sense that when a theater dredges up a lesser-known work from the back catalog of a famous writer the play will need to prove its relevance. Death of a Salesman, for example, is a bona-fide classic whose dramatic worth speaks for itself and can be wheeled out without much directorial intentionality. The less popular ones need to reel its audiences in and Broken Glass’s hook is obvious.
British Jews have been destabilized not only by October 7, but by the subsequent rise in antisemitism, violence in Gaza, and the shrugging shoulders of indifference from non-Jewish friends and colleagues. Many sense a gulf between the duality of Anglo-Jewish identity and the question their future in Britain. So a new production of Broken Glass at the Young Vic should rattle all of us to the core. Why doesn’t it?
The antisemitism of 1938 and 2026 may share ostensible similarities, but the fundamental strands of its DNA have evolved. To the modern antisemite, the image of the Jew is not one of wandering alienation, or of shtetl poverty. It is one of colonial violence, racism, insatiable blood lust. How would the Philip Gellburgs of 2026 try to assimilate and win the affection of their gentile colleagues? Perhaps they would drape a keffiyeh around their necks and declare themselves anti-Zionists, just as Philip must performatively distinguish himself from the other Jews as if to say there are Jews it is permissible to abuse, and they are not like me.
In 2026, then, Sylvia’s paralysis metastasizes into something more provocative. Perhaps Broken Glass chides us for failing to recognize burgeoning antisemitism in our own time. Or perhaps Sylvia’s paralysis can be flipped on its head: instead of images of dead Jews beaten up and bloodied on Berlin streets, we are bombarded with images of dead Palestinians, stuck in wrecked buildings or hounded out of their homes by gun-toting settlers. Like Sylvia, we, collectively, might be paralyzed, unable to prevent more horror, more bombs, more war, the death count always ticking up. The guilt persists, but now it is inverted, no longer about the suffering of Jews but about that of others.
We can find a sturdier answer to what Miller would make of antisemitism today not in Broken Glass but in The Crucible. His masterpiece has served as a theatrical Rorschach Test since it premiered at the height of McCarthyism. Its central mechanism maps the hysteria of accusation, the social contagion of fear, the destruction of the individual who refuses to collaborate. But its eternal relevance lies in how it applies with equal force across the political spectrum, wherever mobs bay for violence and crowds swarm with the thrill of self-righteous violence.
Humor is the tried and tested Jewish mechanism of metabolizing pain, and Miller for all his brilliance was not renowned for his sense of humor. His plays are anchored with unrelenting gravity, offering no door through which the audience might open to catch some air. Even Shakespeare understood the necessity of comic relief: the gravedigger in Hamlet who cheerfully philosophizes about death while digging Ophelia’s grave, or Macbeth’s porter, who drunkenly ponders the relationship between alcohol and erectile dysfunction whilst the meat grinder continues whirling. Shakespeare uses humor, not as ornamentation but as a structural necessity to release just enough pressure so that the tragedy can hit harder.
Jacobson, by contrast, utilizes humor not as relief from the weight of darkness but as a way of exploring it. He is one of Britain’s foremost comic novelist, recognized with the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question in 2010, a novel that used wit as a scalpel to dissect the neuroses of British-Jewish identity and the self-consciousness of assimilation. His comedy reaches beyond examining the meaning of British Jewishness, to encompass modern masculinity, multiculturalism, intellectual vanity, and the stories we delude ourselves with to avoid confronting who we really are. Howl is an organic extension of that project, except the stakes feel higher now, and the silences after the laughter has passed echo louder.
Howl directly grasps the nettle of post-October 7 anxiety and blurs the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Behind the protagonist Ferdinand Draxler, a Jewish headmaster of a South London school, looms the inheritance of trauma from his mother’s survival in Nazi death camps, and ahead of him is his own daughter, a pro-Palestinian activist. At a chance encounter between opposite sides of a demonstration, she denounces her father as a colonialist Zio pig. Draxler starts to unravel into madness, crumbling under the weight of both history and the future.
For Jacobson, the unbearable can be survivable precisely by refusing to treat it as such. One episode sees Draxler chance upon protesters gluing their hands to a portrait of Peter Paul Rubens’s Samson and Delilah at the National Gallery. Samson famously pulled down a Philistine temple, collapsing it upon himself and his captors, and is therefore complicit in genocide. That or, Draxler wonders, the protesters might have conflated Rubens, the Flemish artist, with Reubens the kosher deli on Baker Street. Soon it is clear that Draxler relies on wisecracks as medicine to soothe the pain of his fracturing relationship with his daughter. The pain of a family split down the middle has cleft his heart in twain, not just because they disagree politically, but because the gap between them is too insurmountable.
The ancient Greeks insisted on pairing tragedy with comedy because they are two faces of the same truth. The truth for Miller and Jacobson is that the gravest danger antisemitism poses is not only violent persecution, but the splinters that shatter the self from within. Philip Gellburg destroys himself trying to dissolve into a society that will never fully accept him. Ferdinand Draxler is the mirror image, destroying himself by retreating from a society he refuses to accept.
Or maybe the lesson from the Greeks is that however bleak it gets, we can always find room for silliness. Mel Brooks has a joke about Greek tragedians: a tailor asks an ancient Greek “Euripides?” The Greek replies: “Yeah, Eumenides?”
