Our Glass House

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We go from room to room in an unremarkable end-of-terrace in Wester Hailes and listen to the stories of six victims of domestic violence: four women, a man, a little boy. This almost overwhelming play compels us to confront the misery that we leave other people to suffer alone.

Our Glass House is too accomplished to seem hectoring. The acting is excellent. The script, derived from victims' testimonies, is crystal-clear. Each room is a meticulously-imagined world, to the tiniest detail - playing cards scattered in the bedroom of an adolescent poledancer, toy soldiers in a little boy's playroom. Common Wealth take bold risks, including a choreographed sequence—a masterpiece of controlled violence—in which each character's unhappiness is reduced to a single gesture: one woman bashes a typewriter and hurls handful after handful of coins into a tin box; another manically stacks and re-stacks the same set of dishes.

The subject matter allows the play's artistic limitation—you can't follow every storyline—to become part of its design. You hear thumps and screams from elsewhere in the building and reflect on the crimes that go overlooked because it's easier to ignore such troubling noises.

The play tails off in its more conventional later sections. A scene in which child actor Luke Gordon becomes a sardonic barrister, giving voice to a beaten woman's feeling that she is herself to blame, seems a bit showy. And the ending feels too contrived to offer much catharsis. If anything, that testifies to the remarkable intensity of what came before.