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Our Glass House

Our Glass House review

Site specific / Summerhall

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It's only after a 30 minute bus or taxi ride to the outskirts of Edinburgh, in a quiet, tidy little cul-de-sac in a green house with a garden that you'll find this show from theatre company Common Wealth which explores issues surrounding domestic abuse.

The company have completely taken over the house to create this immersive piece, and have transformed the rooms into mini performance spaces. The audience is free to wander through the rooms, which each have a different feel: one has a ticking grandfather clock and sepia pictures on the wall, another is a modern teenager's bedroom, cluttered with clothes, vodka bottles and posters.

Characters move around the house: a young boy scribbles pictures in his pad; a pregnant woman cleans in the kitchen and a young man restlessly paces. These are all characters affected by domestic abuse and each performs fragmented monologues which are based on real interviews conducted by the show's director and producer Evie Manning and Rhiannon White.

The immersive set itself is very nice, there's a lot of attention to detail and the rooms have a sense of the fantastical about them. There's a grand piano stuck to one of the ceilings and a trail of flowers streaming from the top corner of the dining room.

But it's very hard to get a grasp on who the characters are and where they come from. The piece is designed so that you catch snippets of what is going on, never the full story and as such, doesn't achieve the potency it's aiming for. 

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