Dolan Cummings
posted 4 December 2006

Ryan Craig's new play is on one level very much a play of ideas, exploring questions of truth, free speech and identity. But dramatically the play is dominated by two less intellectual questions. Will young lawyer Myles Brody go ahead with defending the Holocaust denier Elena Manion? And will he get off with his attractively needy live-in landlady Tara?

The first question is not as intellectual as it might have been, because it hinges less on the question of free speech than on Myles' tortured feelings about his own Jewishness, an issue familiar from Craig's earlier play What We Did to Weinstein. The second question is not intellectual at all, but for the most part it serves as an entertaining subplot, echoing the neurosis of the main plot. At the beginning of the play, Myles (Daniel Weyman) seems utterly deracinated and emotionally vacant, explaining to Tara that he buys the music he is told to, 'For my demographic. Age, gender, race, learning.' 'That's extremely sad,' Tara (Emma Cunniffe) observes. His working class, Jewish father Pete (Fred Ridgeway) doesn't know the identity of Myles' current client, but she's a news story, so they discuss her anyway, and Pete becomes his son's Jewish conscience.

The case against Elena (Sian Thomas) is that her latest book, which rehearses familiar loony-right denials of the existence of gas chambers etc during World War Two, is calculated to incite racial hatred. Legal questions aside, of course Elena is motivated by racism, and it's a bit odd that Ryan Craig introduces this as a revelation towards the end of the play, when Myles provokes her into an antisemitic rant. It is as if we can't be satisfied that Elena really is a nasty piece of work until she speculates about going to prison and being surrounded by 'Pakis and coons'. This is more theatrically electrifying than is historical revisionism, of course, but it seems like an admission of failure to dramatise the play's key ideas.

It is more effective than it might have been, though, because not all of what Elena has to say is monstrous, either superfically or in substance. The fact that right-wing loonies sometimes object to political correctness or smoking bans doesn't mean those arguments themselves are tarnished. Elena also makes some perfectly sensible points about the nature of historical truth, that it is never fixed for all time, and that knowledge of any kind can't be determined by consensus. She asks Myles to concede that he is not totally sure about the Holocaust. 'Admit that there is a germ of doubt in your mind that all the things they've told you, the media, Hollywood, all the things you thought about this subject… there might be some room for questioning. That's all I ask.'

In his 1970s series The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski quotes Oliver Cromwell's famous plea, 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.' Ironically, Bronowski was addressing the unwavering totalitarian mindset that made the Holocaust possible. Official ideologies of any kind rarely stand up to reasoned consideration; they depend on unquestioning loyalty. What's so disturbing about the criminalisation of Holocaust denial is that it threatens to turn the historical truth of the Holocaust - which can be demonstrated again and again in open debate, as it is later in the play - into just such an ideology.

Myles could have conceded that there is room for questioning the accepted historical account of the Holocaust, while insisting that Elena acknowledge the overwhelming 'probability', given the abundant evidence, that it is quite simply true. How strange to devote one's life to arguing a position that is, to put it as charitably as I can, 'almost certainly' complete rubbish. It is Pete, in a conversation with Myles and Tara, who asks the million dollar question: 'If you think the Holocaust was justified, why spend so much time trying to prove it never happened?' The answer, of course, is that these people are fundamentally dishonest. Holocaust denial is not a serious historical project but an intellectual smokescreen for bigotry.

Unfortunately this means it, and they, are not especially interesting. The more interesting discussions in the play are those involving Myles, Pete and Tara in various combinations, and bringing in other questions like the Mohammed cartoons controversy. Ultimately, though, the play is less about free speech than identity, with Myles finally embracing his Jewishness not through taking a political position, but simply by connecting with his father.

The relationships are all convincingly brought to life by an effective cast under Anthony Clark's direction, except for a disastrous silver screen-style tussle-cum-kiss between Myles and Tara. The dialogue is better. At one point Myles protests about the noise Tara makes during sex with a fleeting boyfriend. 'I can see ripples in my cocoa,' he complains pathetically. The ripples made by Elena's ranting are just as inconsequential, but if The Glass Room fails to hit the spot intellectually, there is enough going on in terms of stray thoughts, wit and bawdy humour to make it a worthwhile evening's entertainment.

Till 23 December 2006.