In 1898, factory inspector Lucy Deane Streatfeild highlighted the dangers of asbestos. Since then, every use of the substance has been in the knowledge it was toxic. Yet more than a century on, it still kills 5,000 workers a year. That makes a lot of people angry.
It is this anger that elevates Frances Poet’s witty four-hander from a standard-issue illness play to something more polemical. The playwright doesn’t only rail against death, but against the injustice of a preventable, man-made disease.
In a story inspired by a friend whose parents died six months apart, Poet doubles the injustice: the fibres that debilitate shipyard electrician Jack (Jonathan Watson) have also entered the lungs of his wife Beanie (Maureen Carr) thanks to her tireless washing of his contaminated overalls.
In Jemima Levick’s excellently acted production for Stellar Quines and the Citizens theatre in Glasgow, clothes become of central importance. Like the bean-nighe of Gaelic folklore, Beanie washes the clothes of someone about to die. They are the link between the workplace and the home, their cleaning, ironing and folding a symbol of one person’s care for another. Made threadbare by moths or worn with age, clothes are tied to the person who wore them. They are the fibres that bind us together – just as the fibres of asbestos cast us apart.
By bringing an industrial matter into the domestic sphere, Poet connects the personal and the political. The drama, though, relies on sentiment more than analysis. As Jack and Beanie near their fate, the romance between their daughter (Suzanne Magowan) and her boss (Ali Craig) takes over, offering sweet resolution where you might expect bitter recrimination.
At the Pearce Institute, Glasgow, on 24 October. Then touring until 2 November.
