Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 20 September 2011, and touring

AFTER all these years it shouldn’t still be such a surprise, but one of the many remarkable things about Ena Lamont Stewart’s 1947 tenement tragedy is how many women there are on stage.

Although the playwright’s subject is the Depression of the 1930s when unemployment among working-class men was at a height, she shows the impact of poverty in terms of its effect not on men, but on the home, traditionally the realm of women.

Louise McCarthy, Lorraine McIntosh, Julie Wilson Nimmo, Michael Nardone in Men Should Weep (photo Manuel Harlan)

We see not only Maggie Morrison, looking after children, granny and despairing husband, but also her female neighbours and extended family. For them, economics is not just a question of having bread on the table (everyone is forever hungry in this play), but of even more troubling matters such as illness, domestic violence, criminality, low self-esteem, alcohol abuse and prostitution.

What Lamont Stewart shows, in painful, painstaking detail, is that the loss of a pay packet has consequences far beyond the immediate labour market. It is not coincidence that neighbour Mrs Bone is frequently beaten up by her husband, not by chance that daughter Jenny is prepared to sell herself to escape the domestic midden, and not accidental that Maggie’s sister Lily has given up on men altogether. Economics is at the root of all their woes, whether it is the men’s emasculation or the baby’s TB.

Even the way the characters talk to each other is a symptom of their situation. In this bleak, troubling and intense production by Graham McLaren for the National Theatre of Scotland, Lorraine McIntosh lets us see that Maggie is a devoted mother and loving wife even while she is exploding with rage at her workload or criticising her neighbours for harbouring head lice. Just as there is literally no room in her flat in Colin Richmond’s claustrophobic design, there is no metaphorical room for politeness in a life of unrelenting hardship.

Somehow, her relationship with Michael Nardone as husband John remains beautiful, but even that is under continued assault.

All of which means Men Should Weep is not an ideal first-date show. It is grim, heart-breaking and, unlike many working-class dramas, only occasionally funny. But it is also steady in its political analysis, urgent in its message and, performed here with a proper feel for the language and the setting, brutally compelling in its sad portrait of survival against the odds.

© Mark Fisher, 2011

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland
• Mark Fisher