Wash house blues don’t worry four woman starring in Tweed Theatre’s latest production.

The water gurgles, the lungs gasp with effort, the steam eddies round the stalls; the hard working regulars at the steamie are doing what they do best - cleaning messy clothes.

It’s a Glasgow wash house in the mid 1950s on the night of Hogmanay and the locals are desperate to finish as the last hours of the year tick away.

The banter swirls around as they do their tasks - Magrit, hard and cynical after years of a drunken partner and unapprecaited effort, Mrs Culfeathers, worn down by years of hard darg and wistfully calling up the past, Dolly, dittery but always keeping a kind eye out for Mrs Culfeathers, and Doreen, younger, not yet world weary, looking forward to her new home in the promised land of Drumchapel.

The play is about their lives, their hopes, their lost opportunities and crackles with poignant snapshots of what might have been.

hard won solidarity and joyous bawdy humour. The indominitable spirit of these working class women shines through. The modern idea of entitlement would never occur to them but ironically, their blood, sweat and tears makes them uniquely entitled to the world’s respect.

Andy, the increasingly inebriated wash house, mechanic, weaves around them as an exemplar of mounting male ineffectiveness.

Ultimately, he has to be trollied off as the women find, as ever, a practical solution to their problems.

The play ends with the possibility of hope as the women gear up for the Old Year’s Night celebration. Nothing will defeat them; as the saying goes: “Wha’s like us? Gey few a’their a’deid” This celebration of the end of an era and the birth of a new one in British life is at the Eastgate Theatre in Peebles.

Performances at 7.30pm on, Friday, and Saturday, September 5 and 6, with a matinee at 2.30pm on the Saturday. Hurry, as tickets are going fast.