IT’S the outright identification with working women that makes Francis Poet’s outstanding play Fibres (Citizens Theatre, Glasgow/Touring, ★★★★★) so effective.

Maureen Carr, as the central character Beanie, has been poisoned with asbestos from washing her husband’s clothes. “No-one wanted my brain,” she says after a lifetime of working with her hands but it is through her autodidact’s brain that we understand not just what asbestos does to the body but how the whole syndrome fits into capitalist oppression.

Her dying husband may be fatalistic but she remains rational, even as a remembered voice after her own death, in the dreams of her grieving daughter. “Just you make our deaths cost them,” she insists softly.