The labyrinthine backstage space of Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre has, at times, a theatrical potential to equal that of its auditorium, a point plainly not lost on David Leddy. For some years this theatrical buccaneer has shown a propensity for fearless experiment and in this site-specific piece his capacity to combine dark poetry with a paradoxical mix of forensic detachment and passionate proselytising realises itself ingeniously.

Ghostly twins: Cora Bissett and Angela Darcy

In Sub Rosa, the secret referred to in the title is a murder, but we meet neither victim nor criminal in the telling. Instead, through four monologues and a duologue delivered by various theatre employees, we hear the tale of Flora, a 12-year-old runaway who becomes a star turn in a Victorian theatre. The owner of the theatre, Hunter, though, exacts a toll of sexual abuse and appalling violence for her success.

Leddy directs his own script with an admirable sureness of touch, bringing out, through Nich Smith’s lighting design, all the eerie tawdriness of the story in our journey through various property rooms, costume departments and dilapidated green rooms of the venue. On the way, we meet characters such as the ill-fated strongman (David Magowan) who befriends Flora, and ghostly Siamese twins (Cora Bissett and Angela Darcy), each of whom seeks to remind us of the voyeuristic nature of the theatre, and the strict and often brutal class hierarchy it can represent in microcosm.

If the piece is compelling throughout, its real power is realised by the final monologue, delivered with brilliant, icy precision by Louise Ludgate as the jealous head chorus girl of the theatre. Describing a point where she might save a heroine who is clearly marked for destruction from the start, she looks very evenly at the audience and says: “I do the same thing as you... I do nothing.”

Suddenly, the references to “revolution in the Winter Palace” and Voltaire’s maxim “it’s dangerous to be right when those in power are wrong” that echo through the text are brought sharply into contemporary focus. The inertia and voyeurism of a middle class in the midst of immense inequality is condemned, as the distancing trope of Victorian Gothic is stripped away. The theatre has long specialised in biting the well-manicured hand that feeds it, but rarely with such cunningly seductive articulacy.

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