Fast Labour

Published Thursday 24 April 2008 at 14:30 by Kevin Berry

Steve Waters’ new play follows the rise and eventual downfall of Victor, an illegal immigrant worker from the Ukraine.

Victor plays the system. He sees how things are and sets himself up as a gangmaster, supplying labourers to Fenland farms and calling his company Fast Labour.

Waters is concerned with people and the situations they are caught in rather than the trumpeting of issues. Victor, played by Craig Kelly, had a sausage factory in the Ukraine but he lost that in murky circumstances. His wife, a spot-on performance from Charlotte Lucas, comes over to England and is shocked by the change in him. Victor has become part of a wretched system.

Victor’s rise and the scale of his power need some explaining. His relationship with a factory personnel officer, Kirsty Stuart in a confident debut, is very wham-bam. There are many whats and whys in a fractured narrative. The interest in this play is in the moral ambiguities of its characters - the way that they accept things, the lies and the illegalities and the way things are.

Kelly shades Victor very well. He is clever enough but not quite ruthless enough to succeed.

When an expected tragedy happens, a fire in a dilapidated farmhouse, it is much too late in the play. Events have already been set in motion and its shock value is negligible.

The unrelenting flatlands of Norfolk and Lincolnshire are shown with high impact, full width film from Simon Daw and Mic Pool. Daw’s adaptable steel and sliding doors set serves the story well.