by Mick Brian
With Sandcastles Productions marking its debut production with Charlie McGuire’s original play Glass House, the cast and crew behind this production are clearly anything but inexperienced as the piece delivers its thrills and emotional beats at every turn.
What Glass House ultimately delivers is a play packed with fascinating questions about the nature of transaction and social transience; questions for which, it would be amiss to neglect, a public bus is not only an apt but a deeply compelling setting. For its sharp 55-minute run time, the audience are held in suspense with the passengers themselves as our collective inaction serves as the play’s crux.
What the perhaps overly wordy synopsis does get right is this: a houseless man, unable to buy a ticket, boards a bus and drags the six others on board into a ‘mire of social tension’. It’s a simple premise, yet McGuire adeptly and continually reinvents the tension of this idea in a way not dissimilar to Hitchcock’s approach to bottle storytelling; think ‘Rear Window’.
At age 21, this is McGuire’s third original play, having penned and staged his first effort ‘Sandcastles’ (from which his production company naturally gets its name) in 2021 before his sophomore script ‘Vignettes from an Inkblot Archipelago’ was met with critical acclaim (★★★★ – Varsity, ★★★★ – The Tab) just last year.
Following his work directing a bevy of projects whilst at university in Cambridge, the mercifully compactly-titled Glass House shows a maturity in its consistent empathy, flair and razor-sharp dialogue. It moves from social realism, to political agitation, to a fantasy about love overcoming hate. At other times, it takes on an existential dread, feeling like a timeless, placeless hell, similar to the works of Samuel Beckett, or simply an inescapable trap, as an Alan Bennett character might experience. The play is far more than 7 strangers sat on a bus for an hour.
And about those strangers; the cast were truly excellent across the board, meeting and arguably exceeding the demands of the script. So strong was each performance that it felt impossible to single-out a protagonist, I simply let myself be compelled by each actor to invest deeply – almost immediately- in either loving or hating their character. It’s that sort of play.
Sarah, executed with gripping intensity and striking emotional sincerity by Marta Zalicka, certainly has the most to say as she commands the bus with Malcolm Tucker-esque quips and hard-nosed logic. Rising directly to Sarah’s challenge is Freya, brought to life by May Daws, who is routinely the beating heart and moral compass of the bus. Daws plays Freya’s simmering frustration to perfection and her chemistry with Zalicka was one of the play’s most compelling dynamics.
Freya’s girlfriend/not girlfriend Natalie brings further tension to the bus with a painfully-apparent urgency for her feelings to be requited, as Madeleine Whitmore skillfully conveys the weight of her emotional exasperation often through a mere micro expression. As the play progresses, Whitmore becomes more involved in the verbal sparring and superbly delivers the plays most biting one-liners.
Similarly quiet yet nowhere near as observant, Harry Lloyd-Yorke’s Calum feels like a character who could easily have slipped towards a Harry Enfield-reminiscent teenage stereotype. Lloyd-Yorke’s portrays apathy, however, with such well-timed line deliveries and poignant stillness that Calum has more of the menace of a Lord of the Flies character than the dullness of an Enfield trope.
Charles Wolrige-Gordon scored many of the play’s laughs with his portrayal of Colin, however prevented Colin from coming off as merely a comic stock character by lacing many of his lines with genuine threat and malice. Far less loathsome was Joe Orrell’s performance as Owen, the bus driver who seems to be stuck in some form of Beckett-esque purgatory. Sporting a flawless Welsh accent, Orrell undergoes a character progression which may not feel earned in the hands of a lesser actor, but was deeply authentic and ultimately heartbreaking.
Perhaps most surprising is Rafael Griso’s performance as Eden, the houseless man who can’t afford a ticket, which soars from invigorating the play’s ecstatic, surrealist moments to a remarkable subtlety. Naturally, there are ethical questions to be raised about performing homelessness on stage, especially within the context of the Edinburgh Fringe, but I was glad to see that this is something the play very much interrogates. Without spoiling the scene, as it really was a great shock to the system, Glass House questions in a troublingly-entertaining way why Eden must give us something in order for us to sympathise with his plight.
Outside of the play itself, the team are evidently aware of the potentially problematic nature of performing a play with a prominent houseless character at a festival quietly-renowned for its displacement of the homeless; the play will partner with a homeless charity in Edinburgh, having charity collection boxes at each show and donating profits of the Fringe run to a local homeless charity.
The play tackles a lot, not only thematically and narratively, but theatrically. Attempting to pull off a fictional documentary angle, where interviews of the characters on stage are used to reconstruct a story that supposedly happened years ago, may have felt overstuffed had the play not benefitted from the expert technical design and execution of Barash Tunahan. Interweaving purposefully homespun-sounding interviews with a forlorn and jazzy soundtrack whilst punctuating the play’s emotional beats with precision – Tunahan’s work seamlessly builds the world of the play in effortlessly cinematic fashion.
If I were to critique the production, I would say that Glass House perhaps is not the best fit for a space like the Mission Theatre. The Mission, a treasured and historic performance space in Bath, has a scale to it which does not benefit the intimacy which McGuire is evidently shooting for, however I am sure this will be remedied by the venue they will find themselves at in Edinburgh.
Whilst I am eager to see what McGuire and Sandcastles Productions do next, Glass House is without a doubt a brilliant piece of Fringe theatre.
★★★★★
Glass House is at the Edinburgh Fringe from the 18th-23rd August at Greenside Venues George Street in the Olive Studio.
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