Frances Poet’s latest play is a condemnation of an atrocious wrong and a hymn of praise to a marriage. “What’s worse than asbestos? Asworstos!” jokes Jack (a Billy Connolly fan), but his cancer is no laughing matter. Almost 50 years ago, Jack spent a few days cutting and fitting asbestos on Glasgow’s shipyards and Beanie shook out his dusty overalls before washing them. “1898. The year a factory inspector raised the alarm about asbestos,” says Beanie to the doctor who tells her that she too has mesothelioma. Maureen Carr and Jonathan Watson give heart-wrenching, unsentimental portrayals of this resilient couple facing the end of a life of shared isolation.
The story of Beanie and Jack interlaces with that of their thirtysomething daughter, Lucy, and her fibre-optic-cable-laying boss, Pete (Suzanne Magowan and Ali Craig, both vivid in the tentative awkwardness of making a connection). While this sets the play’s themes against a wider horizon, it doesn’t quite work structurally: intersecting scenes, heavy on explicatory monologue, don’t build into drama. That said, writing, performances and direction (by Jemima Levick) all offer strong moments – and make blood boil at asbestos injustice.
This co-production with the female-focused company Stellar Quines, launches the Glasgow Citizens Theatre Company’s Women season, featuring work written by women, directed by women and communicating the world from a woman’s perspective. With Fibres, it is off to a passionate, principled start.
