Ena Lamont Stewart's 1947 play set in a Glasgow tenement during the 1930s compares well to many a masterpiece about the cramped life of the poor where children and grandparents live cheek by jowl.
In director Josie Rourke's National Theatre debut, this slice of claustrophobic life fills the vast Lyttelton stage as a cross-section of the louse-infected, grime-saturated block.
Bunny Christie's superb design includes the stairwell to the left and, above, the living space of a wife and wife-beating couple, though we can only see their legs except when he hits her so hard she falls to the floor.
Sometimes what goes on upstairs distracts from what happens in the Morrisons' kitchen which doubles as the parents' bedroom. The depression is raging, father John, a labourer, is out of work and the family of nine, including five children eke out an existence from what little is earned by Sharon Small's stoic, skivvying matriarch Maggie.
It is the women who keep this family together. The men are diminished to uselessness. A similar observation is served up by Stewart's American counterparts - you think of Odets's Brooklyn family in Awake and Sing! or, with the almost uncannily similar issue about housing, Lorraine Hansberry's Chicago-set A Raisin in the Sun. Like those plays it is the language – here, a broad Glaswegian brogue that is not always easy on the southern softie ear - that defines drama and humour.
But lacking here is the tension of a central dilemma that made the American plays the masterpieces that they are. (Tel: 020 7452 3000)