Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Glass House
Sandcastles Productions
Genre: Drama, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Greenside
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
With a dramatic premise, strong acting from the entire ensemble, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Glass House is a taut, engaging, and thought-provoking piece sure to stimulate much post-theatre conversation.
Review
Glass House takes place on a stationary bus, during a heavy rainstorm, in February 2011. Five paying passengers and the driver are locked in conflict over a fellow rider, a homeless man who cannot afford the fare. The play’s title cleverly resonates on several levels: the audience sees everything that happens on the simple set, which effectively evokes a transparent bus; the inner reflections and later recollections of the characters are laid bare, via recorded interviews interlaced with the live action; and, of course, the people on the bus are obsessed with the “sin” of being homeless and indigent, while they themselves can hardly be said to be without blame.
This is character-driven writing, and both the characterisations and the actors who bring them to life are uniformly excellent. Playwright Charlie McGuire succeeds brilliantly – aided by strength of the cast – in the difficult task of putting a social issue at the heart of the play while avoiding didacticism or compromising the individuality of any of the characters. A wonderful, true-to-life messiness suffuses much of the dialogue, and the conflicts between the riders consistently resist easy resolution.
The play cannot be called naturalistic, however. It exists in an adjacent, lightly-stylized arena, that, along with the claustrophobia of the bus and the constant audio of pouring rain, keeps the atmosphere tense and interestingly uncomfortable.
An early solo jazz dance helps establish that we’re outside the realm of realism. Other script choices reinforce that feeling, though they unfortunately also come off as rather contrived. The driver’s refusal to allow other riders to pay the homeless man’s fare, for example, is nonsensical but necessary for all that follows, as is the subsequent improbable bus breakdown, and the fact that it occurs to no one to phone for assistance. When the passengers spend considerable time deciding to hold a vote, their insistence that it be blind is as inexplicable as the fact that the system they finally arrive at is not.
All of this is, of course, the playwright’s prerogative, but, collectively (and in addition to the sequence of events at the end), they add up to a strong dream-like impression, bordering on the territory of folk tale, where logic is freely suspended. For some kinds of storytelling, that’s a bonus. Less so, I think, when the story’s core is an exploration of a complex issue that exists in the real world.
Despite the way in which the writing somewhat undermines itself, Glass House brings together many strengths and is notable for the uniformly fine performances of the ensemble. The fact that the production is from a new, young troupe only adds to the achievement and makes one eager to see what they might take on next.
