The Bevellers

Monotonous occupations have been the backdrop for some of Scotland's most celebrated plays - notably The Steamie and The Slab Boys - and at a glance, Roddy McMillan's The Bevellers seems like it might fit neatly into the same category.

There's plenty of humour in the 1973 play, including a handful of appropriately sharp one-liners, but it suffers from weak structure and under-developed characters.

Informed by the playwright's own experience in the trade, The Bevellers story tells of Norrie Beaton's first day at work in a Glasgow glass factory in the 1970s. Fresh from school and unprepared for a job that's a grind in more ways than one, the youngster manages to get himself into at least a month's worth of scraps in a single shift.

Foreman Bob Darnley is a patient teacher but his workers are a dysfunctional bunch, to put it mildly. No sooner has the young lad got his coat off than second-generation hardman The Rouger starts slandering his mother, while Joe, newly promoted to beveller, is delighted to at last have a junior colleague to bully and torment.

A few keys aspects of the storyline are pure farce - a glass worker prone to seizures; an amateur weightlifter crashing kilos of steel into the floor on his lunch breaks - and these sit uneasily alongside the playwright's rather heavy-handed reference to the long-term physical damage of the trade, and a disturbing scene where banter and knockabout violence turn to something far more serious.

Director Jeremy Raison doesn't seem sure how to deal with these shifts in tone - indeed, for a few moments we're left uncertain about the seriousness of that last incident, which follows on from one of several implausible mini-dramas. Judith Williams gives a stand-out performance as Nancy, the play's only female character and the only role with even a hint of ambiguity. Citz regulars last saw Andrew Clark as a vicious gang leader in No Mean City - by comparison The Rouger is a strictly two-dimensional thug.

The script demands a substantial, split-level set and Jason Southgate's workshop is convincingly dusty and claustrophobic. However, the use of flexible plastic to represent glass serves to break the carefully constructed illusion.