“The Steamie”, Dundee Rep Theatre
Mark Brown on Tayside
★★★★☆
22 September 2026
Tony Roper’s comic play The Steamie – which will reach its 40-year anniversary next year – enjoys legendary status in Scotland. In a poll of Scottish television viewers, the 1988 TV adaptation was voted the second favourite show (behind much-loved detective series Taggart) ever to be broadcast by commercial channel STV.
Photo credit: Christopher Bowen.
Writer Roper is best known as a comic actor, most famously playing Jamsie Cotter in the TV sitcom Rab C Nesbitt. His creative partner – providing a suite of songs for The Steamie – was the actor-musician David Anderson (a stalwart, over more than five decades, of numerous theatre institutions, ranging from Wildcat theatre company to A Play, a Pie and a Pint).
Set on Hogmanay in a Glasgow washhouse in the mid-1950s, the play is an unapologetically nostalgic contemplation of a gender-stratified Scottish society as seen – first-and-foremost – through the lives of four working-class women of three generations. They are joined by Andy, the male caretaker-cum-handyman who works in the municipal facility.
Almost four decades on from its Glasgow premiere, Roper’s piece remains among the most produced of Scottish plays. This latest outing is directed by Roper himself (now aged 85) and presented by newly established Rerr Terr Productions (in association with Neil Laidlaw, Selladoor Worldwide and Dundee Rep Theatre). It is pretty much close to perfect.
Every member of the cast – which includes actor-producer Louise McCarthy (who founded Rerr Ter alongside Ryan Dewar) in the role of big-hearted, delightfully gullible Dolly – fits their character superbly. McCarthy – as those who remember her standout performance in John Byrne’s Cuttin’ a Rug at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow back in 2017 can attest – is a more versatile actor than some might assume from her CV (which includes her long-standing comic work, on both stage and TV, with Gayle Telfer Stevens).
It is too easy for stage and screen directors to typecast working-class actors like McCarthy or her younger compatriot Eilidh Loan (who, I am glad to see, is playing the lead role in the new adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow). I’d challenge any theatre director to cast McCarthy in a play by the likes of Shakespeare, Beckett or Caryl Churchill. She would, I’m sure, give the kind of memorably robust-yet-subtle performance we have seen in the past from previous generations of great working-class actors (such as Timothy Spall and Kathy Burke).
That said, like all of Roper’s characters in The Steamie, Dolly is a well drawn, sympathetic and wonderfully funny role. McCarthy plays her with an energetic daftness and relatable good humour.
Nowhere is this truer than in her gossiping with her friends Magrit and young Doreen about Maureen McClandish (a woman from the locality whose morals and cleanliness are widely derided). Ali Cleland plays Magrit with delicious sarcasm and underlying decency, while Eden Barrie’s dreamer Doreen is the very image of youthful idealism, tempered by tough experience.
There are equally fine performances from Lesley Mackie (as old Mrs Culfeathers, who makes her living doing the washing for middle-class families) and Paul J Corrigan (who balances Andy neatly between ludicrous self-regard and undeniable bonhomie).
Anderson’s songs – including numbers such as Labour of Love and Pals – draw affectingly and humorously upon the play’s bittersweet empathy with the experience of women. Indeed, that empathy – along with the drama’s lack of spite (especially where Protestant-Catholic distinctions are concerned) – is one of the cornerstones of The Steamie’s continued success.
The Glasgow washhouse is designed with tremendous detail and style by Kenny Miller and lit expertly by Emma Jones. In other words, Rerr Terr succeeds in hitting every nail on the proverbial head, giving Scottish theatre a very fine touring production of Roper’s evergreen opus.
Touring until 14 November: rerrterr.com
