David Thacker: Arthur Miller changed the ending of his last great play just to shut me up
Director David Thacker recalls working with the playwright on Broken Glass – and what Miller told him about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
It’s August 4, 1994. I’m sitting next to Arthur Miller and his wife, Inge Morath, in the National’s Lyttelton Theatre on the opening night of his latest play, Broken Glass, which I have directed. I’ve worked with Arthur on seven of his plays and got to know him well, so I can tell he’s excited, even though he hasn’t had a major success of a new play for years and the American premiere – his first on Broadway since 1980 – has not been well received.
That failure particularly stung him because Broken Glass’s striking, contentious scenario addresses Jewish themes that Miller had always kept out of his plays: it is set in Brooklyn, 1938, where Sylvia Gellburg has become paralysed from the waist down after obsessively reading newspaper reports about Nazi humiliation of and cruelty towards Jews, culminating in Kristallnacht. Her husband, Phillip, a Jewish businessman who has spent his life trying to assimilate, visits a Jewish physician, Dr Hyman, who diagnoses Sylvia with “hysterical paralysis”. This forces the couple to reckon with their ethnic identity, self-hatred and the personal cost of trying to fit in. So how will the play be received in London?
Well, by the end of the night, Arthur looks as happy as I’ve ever seen him. The audience were riveted, moved and, to his delight, had appreciated his sense of humour. Afterwards, at Joe Allen’s restaurant in London’s West End, as the pianist tinkles away in the corner, Inge turns to me and says, “Thank you, David – you’ve all made it possible for Arthur to write another play.” I’m thrilled. To explain how that came about, I have to rewind six years.
Conversations with a legendary playwright
In 1988 I was director of the Young Vic theatre in south London, preparing to rehearse Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People with Tom Wilkinson in the lead. But there was a problem: Miller’s text contained American slang – phrases such as “This’ll knock the big bellies into the garbage can” – that you can’t say in an English accent. I phoned his agent and said: “My feeling is we should change any slangy American idioms into English.” I was amazed when she suggested I speak to Miller directly, and set up the call.
You can imagine how nervous I was; I had to make sure I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. On the other end of the line, Miller’s voice was calm. “Why don’t you make the changes you think are right?” he said. “If you have any difficulty, call me.” This led to several invaluable phone conversations, during which he shared his thoughts, and I felt able to suggest re-inserting some speeches he had cut from Ibsen’s original. I was astonished that he was happy for us to try this.
That was the start of our relationship. The production was successful and transferred to the West End. It just so happened that Inge, an acclaimed photographer, had an exhibition coming up in her native Austria. So she and Arthur came over to Europe for that and stopped in London en route to see An Enemy of the People.
Our American producers (Miller enthusiasts, Frank and Woji Gero) organised a gala evening. I met Miller at the theatre door and when we walked in together, Jeffrey Archer, who owned the Playhouse Theatre, turned to his guests (among them Neil Kinnock, the leader of the opposition at the time) and announced, “This is Mr Henry Miller.” Thankfully I don’t think Arthur heard; he was a bit hard of hearing by then.
Arthur met the cast the next day and they all fell in love with him instantly; he had a charisma that was attractive to every actor, man or woman. He was sincere, very funny and spoke in perfectly formed sentences; his brain and tongue worked in total synchronicity. We had agreed that, during this trip, he should come to rehearsals for our next Young Vic production, his double bill Two Way Mirror starring Helen Mirren and Bob Peck. To my great relief, Arthur happily joined in, even improvising a phone call with Bob’s character.
Two years later, I was rehearsing The Price at the Young Vic when Miller again joined me in the rehearsal room. He and Inge sat watching our first run-through within touching distance of the understandably nervous cast (Peck again, David Calder, Alan MacNaughton and Marjorie Yates), who played it brilliantly straight through. Arthur was gripped, endearingly laughing at his own jokes. But when, after two hours, we got to the end, he said: “First question is: why did you decide to do it without an interval?” I pointed to the printed edition, where it said the play can be performed with an intermission but it’s preferable without. “Yeah,” he replied, “but I was young then and I had a better bladder!” We then enjoyed an extraordinary week with Arthur rehearsing the entire play with us. He was honest, generous, insightful and great fun.
It would be presumptuous to say we were friends, but we became very good professional colleagues. I occasionally phoned him on Saturday nights. On one occasion I remember discussing American politics, and he said, “Well, there’s this new guy called Clinton… sounds interesting.”
Arthur would phone me saying, ‘I’m having problems…’
Our collaboration on Broken Glass began in 1993 when Arthur sent me a script then called Gellburg. He definitely experienced self-doubt; not “Can I write anymore?” but “Am I writing stuff that people will like?” After reading the new script, I phoned him: “How long has this been going on for you, Arthur?” I meant dealing with his Jewishness. “Oh,” he replied, “about 40 years.”
He later told me that the play was primarily inspired by contemporary events in Bosnia: he was writing about the paralysis of the international community. When Sylvia cries “Where is Roosevelt? Where is England? We’ve got to do something before they murder us all!”, she is voicing Miller’s frustrated response to the ethnic cleansing and mass killings in Bosnia which were to culminate in the genocidal massacre in Srebrenica in 1995.
By the time I received Gellburg, I had left the Young Vic – so I sent the script to Richard Eyre, who was running the National Theatre. Meanwhile Arthur had also sent the play to Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut, who would perform it locally before taking it to Broadway.
As they were rehearsing at Long Wharf, Arthur would phone me saying, “I’m having problems.” Then the producer, Bob Whitehead, called too: “David, the ending of the play isn’t right.” I told him I thought the final scene of the script was far too naturalistic and pointed out that, in an earlier scene, if Sylvia gets out of her wheelchair and storms around, as the stage directions specified, this would blow the climax of the play. “Why not have her stand involuntarily and immediately collapse back?” A minute later, Arthur phoned. “Bob says you’ve got a good idea.” I explained it. “We’ll put it in tonight,” he said.
‘I tried everything I could to help Marilyn’
On June 25, 1994, after two weeks of rehearsals at the National, I flew to New York to watch Broken Glass on Broadway. I had arranged to see the show with Arthur, stay with him for a night at his Manhattan apartment, and then he would drive us to Connecticut for a weekend working at his house. I sat beside him in the stalls and, as the play progressed, became increasingly apprehensive about the way I was approaching rehearsals at the National while simultaneously feeling that the production we were watching did not measure up to the emotional and political demands of the play.
Waiting for a taxi afterwards, Arthur was silent. I thought, “I’ve got to say something.” So I came out with it: “I’m sorry, Arthur, I hated the production.” He wasn’t surprised. That was a huge weight off my mind: it gave me hope that, in London, our treatment of Broken Glass might be more as he would wish. On the way back to his flat, Arthur asked the driver to stop at a deli. I’m not a heavy drinker but I thought, “I hope he buys some whiskey.” He came back with milk and orange juice. That was probably good – it meant I was completely lucid when Arthur put me on the spot: “Well, what would you have done?” I told him I’d have to start from the beginning, “The casting process, the rehearsals… everything.” We talked till three in the morning.
Somewhere between the curtain call of Broken Glass in New York and me leaving Arthur’s home in Connecticut four days later, I lost any inhibitions about talking to him. The crucial shift happened the first time he mentioned Marilyn Monroe (to whom he’d been married from 1956 to 1961, the year before her death). I had asked if any of the characters in Broken Glass were modelled on someone he knew. It turned out there was a real-life case of a woman who was paralysed, and also someone who dressed in black like Phillip Gellburg.
But astonishingly, the inspiration for Hyman was an 80-year-old doctor who had treated Marilyn. “It’s amazing, he could tell from her fingernails how she was,” Arthur said. “On one occasion he was treating her and he pointed to bottles of pills,” Arthur picked up some objects and became the doctor: “Marilyn, you see this? And you see this? They’re killing you.”
Arthur told me, “I tried everything I could to help her, and that’s one reason why I wasn’t writing in that period. It was impossible.” Then he said: “You know they’re doing a play about us at the Royal Exchange Theatre?” (Alex Finlayson’s Misfits, a docudrama about the making of the film of the same name, was staged in Manchester in 1996.) “It just goes to show: you spend years trying to keep someone alive, and that’s what they do to you.” He was clearly wounded by people’s failure to understand what he had lived through.
Intimate revelations about his home life
Two days later, at lunch in his home in Connecticut, sitting around the table he’d made himself – he was an expert carpenter – Arthur enquired after “Eddy Arthur”, pleased that my wife (the actress Margot Leicester) and I had acknowledged him when naming our third son. Inge asked about our baby Elizabeth, too. There wasn’t a simple answer: it had been a difficult two years; Elizabeth wasn’t hitting developmental milestones and had been referred to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Then Inge mentioned that she and Arthur had a son with Down’s syndrome, Daniel, who was in a residential home. I’d had no idea.
She explained that when Daniel was born, in 1966, the unanimous medical advice they received was that, for the sake of the child, his sister Rebecca and the parents, he should be brought up in a care home. Arthur was relatively quiet as Inge shared these intimate revelations. Looking back, I’m surprised that while Inge visited Daniel almost every day, Arthur went only rarely. Perhaps he found his son’s condition difficult to accept, but I’m sad for Arthur that he missed the great joy and privilege that can be experienced in being the parent of a child with Down syndrome or a learning disability.
A few days later, a new scene for Broken Glass arrived by fax. In it, to my surprise, Hyman’s wife, Margaret, describes working in a paediatric ward: “Sometimes we’d have 30 or 40 babies at the same time. A day or two old and they’ve already got a personality.” Our conversation about Elizabeth and Daniel had evidently fed into this new scene – babies in a ward, and who they become.
How the final piece of Broken Glass fell into place
In July 1994, Arthur arrived in London for the last week of rehearsals at the National. “The great thing about your actors,” he said, “is they’ll be heading in one direction, and you’ll say, ‘No, it’s the opposite direction’, and they’ll do it. With American actors, it would take you all day to get them down from the ceiling.” Typical was his advice to Henry Goodman (Gellburg) “Henry, you’re showing too much emotion here. Gellburg has a heart attack because he suppresses his feelings.” Henry responded effortlessly.
After the final run-through, Arthur was delighted. But I thought the play still needed Sylvia to acknowledge some responsibility for their failed marriage; something like Elizabeth Proctor’s climactic speech in The Crucible – “It were a cold house I kept.” As Arthur got into the taxi to head off to Austria, I pressed him: “I really think you should do this,” I insisted. “All right,” he said, “just to shut you up!”
After midnight, following the final dress rehearsal, I switched on the answerphone to hear Arthur’s voice reciting a new closing speech for Sylvia. It ended: “There’s nothing to blame.” Margot (who was playing Sylvia) and I listened spellbound. I turned to her and said: “We’ll put it in tonight.” And, truly, everything fell into place.
More than 30 years later, I remain convinced that Broken Glass is one of Arthur Miller’s finest plays. But it is extremely hard to do well. The complexity isn’t obvious on the page, which leads some readers to think the text is superficial. My hopes are that the new production at the Young Vic will once again reveal it to be a great play, and one that is important to perform now.
Arthur died in 2005, aged 89, but were he alive today, I’d still be calling him to ask for his insights, particularly since Donald Trump’s first election and during the conflict in Gaza. I know he’d have had some answers. For me he was, and still is, a voice of sanity and truth.
As told to Dominic Cavendish
Broken Glass is at the Young Vic, London SE1 (youngvic.org) until Apr 18
