Anyone surprised to see which economic class was left behind by the tide in New Orleans need only have listened to the playwright Ena Lamont Stewart. "It's only rich folk that can keep themselves to themselves," says the matriarch in Men Should Weep, Maggie Morrison, as she struggles to keep her impoverished family together in a Glasgow tenement flat during the 1930s Depression.
Writing in 1947, Lamont Stewart was making the point that ill-health, casual violence, marital strife, social tensions and criminality are all a product of poverty. When disaster strikes, whether it be a hurricane in Louisiana or the houses that collapse in Men Should Weep, it is the poor who suffer. With a bit of money, Maggie would not have a young son with TB, a teenage daughter leaving home, an old granny draining resources and endless confrontations with her family and neighbours.
Although it was a big hit for Glasgow Unity Theatre in the late 1940s, Men Should Weep would have been lost to history had it not been rediscovered in 1982 with a celebrated production by the theatre company 7:84. Here was a play that could sit alongside O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, being a portrait of working-class experience that was hard-headed, politically angry, blackly funny and rich in demotic poetry.
It also had a tendency to melodrama and a rather dated staginess - something that Charlotte Gwinner's revival for Oxford Stage Company only seems to emphasise. Her approach is reverential rather than radical: the choices she makes are never unexpected, making the play more of a museum curio than the vigorous drama it could be.
Gwinner creates a persuasive sense of the life lived both inside and outside the flat, but the actors lack the majesty to make the characters stand above their squalid conditions. Pauline Turner as Maggie is convincingly put-upon but lacks the spark to give her struggle nobility, especially playing opposite Paul Hamilton's one-dimensional husband. The result is a serviceable reading that roots the play too much in its time.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0141-429 0022. Then touring.
