A remarkably vivid picture of one merciless family and three desperate lives.

Linda McLean's short play One Good Beating is a blackly comic account of a grown-up brother and sister who exact revenge on their violent father. Locking him in the coalshed as retribution for years of sniping, bullying and pain, they are both aching to use their fists on him for once. But he's not defeated. Yet...

One Good Beating was first staged alongside plays by Riccardo Galgani and Iain Crichton as the triptych Family at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 1999.