Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 12 Nov

How far have we been strangled by late capitalism? The revolts taking place around the world would suggest almost to the point of asphyxiation. It’s nearly 65 years since Ena Lamont Stewart’s Scottish classic was written, and director Graham McLaren shows how, crucially, it draws a causal timeline from now back to the economic frailties which shattered any chance of prosperity today.

In the damp, rotting poverty of 1930s Glasgow, Lamont Stewart lays bare the plight of Maggie (Lorraine McIntosh) and her relatives. Squeezed into a tiny tenement flat, she acts as the breadwinner for a family which can find little to no work by cleaning other homes in the area, struggling to support a fragile marriage battered by the intensities of close-knit living.

Colin Richmond’s decrepit freight-train container which houses the claustrophobic apartment really isolates the family from the outside world, as sliding doors invite us to peer in on the characters almost as voyeurs. Set in the depths of the 30s Depression, it goes a long way in reflecting that detachment endured by the masses, as families found themselves cut off from employment opportunities and social welfare despite the State having the means to generate industry. Capitalism had to take a long, hard look at itself before shifting towards the neoliberal ideology we have to thank for today’s spread of mass unemployment and social stratification.

So Lamont Stewart’s seminal text maps out that persistent inequality which snaked its way to our doorsteps – and it’s worth remembering that she set her play only a couple of years after the Equal Suffrage Act of 1928. So she documented more than just a form of poverty or sexism, it was the idea of social injustice itself embodied through the ‘real people’ she strove so vigorously to create. And as much as the occasional gag provides an ironic respite to that tragedy, the play is an immortalisation of the need to challenge the legitimacy of economic ideologies.