“The art of music,” wrote Ralph Vaughan Williams, “above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.” Giuseppe Verdi knew this better than most. His opera about the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s conquering of Jerusalem, Nabucco, propelled the destitute composer to the epicenter of Italy’s artistic ecosystem: and also its politics.

Before unification in 1861, the Italian peninsula was a patchwork of separate states, with Habsburg Austria controlling much of the north. Risorgimento, the socio-political movement calling for Italian unification, called for the end of Austrian rule. Nabucco was the ideal candidate to become a symbol of the nationalist cause: in the plight of the Hebrew slaves, lamenting for their lost homeland, Italian audiences saw their own political struggle mirrored.

Smetana and Sibelius offered something similar for the Czechs and Finns in Dalibor and Finlandia. But the most ardent proponent of operatic nationalism is also its most infamous. Wagner intended his Der Ring des Nibelungen to be a foundational myth for a nation still in search of its soul. Like Verdi’s Italy, Wagner’s Germany was not a unified state, but rather a jumble of rival kingdoms, principalities, and free cities, loosely connected by a shared heritage.

Wagner was a passionate advocate for unification, writing often of his devotion to the “fatherland”. His involvement in the failed revolutionary uprisings of 1848 led to exile in Switzerland, where he conceived of and wrote most of The Ring Cycle, drawing on the Nibelungenlied and other medieval epics to craft a mythical vision of his homeland.

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But why didn’t Britain produce its own Ring Cycle? The talent was there, but the need was not so great. Victorian Britain, at the height of its empire, had little use for art as a vehicle of national self-definition. Industrial prosperity and moral confidence sat comfortably alongside colonial exploitation. A nation that ruled a quarter of the world had no cause to go searching for its soul. Unlike the fragmented nations of continental Europe, still reeling from the shadow of Napoleonic conquest and Habsburg dominance, Britain knew, with considerable satisfaction, exactly what it was.

Indeed, Britain’s self-consciousness was already so distinct that it can use its identity as the basis of satire. Through Gilbert and Sullivan’s light operas we sense a culture so at ease with itself that it can afford to mock its own grandeur. HMS Pinafore lampoons Royal Navy hierarchies; Iolanthe pokes fun at Parliament; Ruddigore mocks the aristocracy.

It was not until Britain was reeling from the Second World War that a strong contender for a national opera emerged. Britten, fleeing war-torn Europe for America, stumbled across E.M. Forster’s essay on poet George Crabbe, whose poem “The Borough” was a proto-Dickensian narrative poem set on the Suffolk coast. It stirred in the expatriate composer, himself a Suffolk native, an overwhelming longing for home. Britten returned to Britain in 1942 and, collaborating with the librettist Montagu Slater, loosely adapted Crabbe’s work into what would become Peter Grimes.

After the mysterious but ultimately accidental deaths of his young apprentices, Grimes is ostracized by his village. Soon, the grim underbelly of the community is sliced open: blood, guts, and paranoia spill out. Grimes splinters into hysteria as the villagers become a murderous mob baying for blood.

Critics immediately recognized the opera’s power when it premiered at Sadler’s Wells, newly reopened after six years of wartime closure. New productions sprung up across Europe, ushering in a new age for British classical music.

As a gay man and a conscientious objector, Britten undoubtedly mapped his own sense of isolation onto Grimes’s exile. But the opera’s potency has grown beyond Grimes’s personal psychodrama. Despite being nominal victors in 1945, Britain had been left exhausted and bankrupt. On the international stage, its status as a global superpower was vanishing, and nationalist movements were gathering pace across its colonies.

With the empire’s days numbered, British identity faced an inflection point, and Peter Grimes has come to mirror this dynamic. The economic dereliction of the Suffolk fishing village bleeds into the psyche of its inhabitants. Boiling indignation fills in the hole in their hearts. Their hopelessness latches onto anyone who is perceived to threaten its fragile order, translating into violence.

Deborah Warner’s 2022 production, now back at the Royal Opera House, amplified questions about Britain’s post-Brexit identity crisis, updating the setting from Crabbe’s early 19th century to something more contemporary. A pugnacious chorus clad in football shirts wield Union Jacks as they call for Grimes’s expulsion, magnifying the moral panic and intoxicating power of the herd. When it premiered, the juxtaposition echoed the still-raw memory of the Euro 2020 final, where nationalism curdled from pride into persecution, and where some fans aimed racist abuse at black players.

Four years on from the original production, Warner’s blend of community decline, paranoia and nationalism has only become more searing. Like in 1945, after all, Britain must again search for its identity in a brave new world ravaged by disorder. We witness this identity crisis play out in public. A hard-Right resurgence proffers an ethnically exclusive vision of Britain. The Union Jack is brandished, like in Warner’s production, as a weapon of division rather than a unifying symbol of pride.

Political upheaval, if nothing else, gives us great art to wrestle with. Perhaps the national uncertainty we face today will inspire a new generation of artists to create new works that can mold a new identity for a new Britain. And as we continue to search for solid ground, post-empire, post-Brexit, post-certainty, we might do well to return to the Suffolk coast where the questions Britten embedded in Peter Grimes have not been answered — but have at least become clearer.

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.

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. 

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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?”