Fast Labour

Synopsis

It hadn’t always been this way. In the Ukraine Victor had a business, a family and a home, but things have changed and he’s fled to the UK in search of a better life. Now instead he’s doing everything from gutting fish to picking carrots. But Victor’s a strong-minded man - he’s not staying at the bottom of the economic food chain, he’s going to build a business of his own and play the gang masters at their own game. With humour and sensitivity this powerful play, focuses on the growing culture of human exploitation delving below the surface to reveal a human account of life as an asylum seeker

Our Review:

25 April 2008

Steve Waters’ plays tend to deal with political issues in a hard-hitting, but entertaining, way, presenting them via vivid individual decisions and confrontations, with plenty of humour to leaven the drama. Sometimes, however, the narrative and the polemic don’t cohere with complete conviction.

So it is with Fast Labour, his take on the exploitation of illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe, premiering in a joint West Yorkshire Playhouse/Hampstead Theatre production. The final stages take on a sentimentality and melodrama at odds with the gritty realism of the lengthy first half. For all that this is an ambitious and intellectually honest stage realisation of a problem that admits no glib answers.

Waters cleverly blurs the “them-and-us” element of the problem by making his protagonist, Victor, a Ukrainian illegal with entrepreneurial ambitions and a past history as a businessman. A desperate scrap of humanity, he is found a job in a fish processing ...

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