It's 1930s Brooklyn, and Sylvia Gellburg is afflicted with "hysterical paralysis". Who's to blame – the Nazis, or her husband? That's the long and short of Arthur Miller's 1994 play, which strains to parallel the persecution of German Jews with an American couple's marital troubles. The play is sometimes more diagnostic puzzle than emotionally involving experience. But, in Iqbal Khan's capable revival, Antony Sher brings the male half of this disastrous marriage to eye-catching life. So agonisingly does he depict emotional constipation that I vowed never again to stifle a tear when a sob would do.
Miller's difficulty is in interweaving the play's domestic and geopolitical strands. Wheelchair-bound Sylvia is terrified by reports of anti-Jewish riots in Germany. But the longer the play goes on, the less that seems relevant to her paralysis, which is clearly triggered by her sexless marriage to buttoned-up property evaluator Philip. To Miller, Philip's denial of Sylvia's sexuality is akin to the Nazis' denial of Jewish humanity. And, just as the Gellburgs' marriage has drifted inarticulately towards devastation, so tragedy is precipitated by global complacency in the face of nazism.
So far, so cerebral: when Miller overlays personal and political atrocity, he does so more wordily and less viscerally than Sarah Kane (in Blasted) and Anthony Neilson (in Stitching), later in the same decade. Even Laura Moody's between-scene cello music keeps us at a distance, encouraging reflectiveness. But proceedings are always engaging, thanks to Lucy Cohu as the wife who has acquiesced in the waste of her life, Nigel Lindsay as the alpha-male doctor seeking to reawaken her, and Sher, as the Jew who wears his desperation to assimilate like a shell. Always in black, he's like a guest at the perpetual funeral of his own sense of self.
