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Fast Labour at the Hampstead Theatre |
West End theatre| Fast Labour |
Hampstead Theatre review| British economy | Migrant labour
FAST LABOUR
Hampstead Theatre
HONEST labour bears a lovely face, the old saying goes, but the true profile of migrant labour can be an altogether uglier affair.
Barely a week passes without the exposure of another gangmaster and his exploitations: emaciated workers living 12 to a single room, slaving 14-hour days for a pittance. And the influx is a political hobby horse – either plague or panacea to the British economy, depending on which newspaper you read. Only during the worst atrocities – such as the 21 cockle pickers drowned at Morecambe Bay in 2004 – does public sentiment unite.
Ukrainian labourer Victor (Craig Kelly) is thrown into this maelstrom at the beginning of Steve Waters’ new play, set among the fish guts and selective bureaucracy of a Scottish fish-processing factory.
Beaten and robbed during transit, Victor’s bedraggled state hides a businessman who has lost everything. “I want to work,” he repeats blindly; the mendacious Grimer (Mark Jax), a character and name straight from the pages of Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, will ensure his wish is wholly and painfully realised.
Beneath his backbreaking and obsequies, Victor dreams of an empire of his own in this “world of gardens”, so far from the communist allotments of home.
His romance with feisty but naïve personnel officer Anita (Kirsty Stuart) proves a means to that end. Before long Victor has his own migrant underlings; the trainers are replaced with expensive brogues, his hands grow smooth and manicured.
A man’s downfall, as we all know, is never far behind his manicure.
Waters is on interesting ground here and for the most part he explores it with tact, sidestepping a moral bias.
“They want the world on a plate and they want Bob Geldof too,” Grimer observes of the British public. Most people choose not to know how their supermarket carrots get chopped, just as Anita – and even Victor, to a degree – turn a blind eye to the unpleasant truths they face.
In the dogged pursuit of this point, the play casts Victor as a “sly old Slav” on the make who only finds compassion once everything has fallen down around him. Fast Labour remains a trenchant parable on human greed and the repetition of history, but it’s hard to give two kopeks about its protagonist.
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