Imagine an Arthur Miller hero brought so low that he didn't even have the American dream to hang on to. That's what Otto Meier is like in Franz Xaver Kroetz's bleak 1978 three-hander, Mensch Meier, performed here for the first time as Tom Fool in a translation by Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis.
Otto has a thankless job on a BMW production line fitting screws into car windscreens. The closest he gets to career development is when he is made to screw the door on as well. Where Miller would have given him a sense of aspiration - however illusory - Kroetz gives him only empty despair.
He is a man defined and confined by his job, his imagination crippled, his family life ruined by unarticulated existential rage. With his unemployed son, Ludwig, and stay-at-home wife, Martha, he is a specific product of the financial downturn of the 1970s, but the soul-destroying system that prompts his midlife crisis is all too familiar.
There are moments in Clare Lizzimore's period production that seem to be more about the wide lapels and bad-taste wallpaper than the universal concerns of an alienated workforce. But, over the course of the play, she establishes how Otto's demoralisation at work affects his sex life, leisure time and ability to treat others with humanity.
By showing not only the explosions but also the mundane business of clearing up, the play has a fragmented rhythm, but the downbeat performances of Liam Brennan, Meg Fraser and Richard Madden bring a sense of ennui worthy of the Royle family.
· Until November 18. Box office: 0141-429 0022.
