IN his new play Fast Labour, Eastern Europe meets East Anglia as Steve Waters focuses on the growing culture of human exploitation by gangmasters, delving below the surface to reveal the world of the asylum seeker.
Last year, the 200th anniversary of William Wilberforce's bill to abolish the British slave trade led to a spate of plays either on Wilberforce's time or on the trafficking trade of today, not least in the sex industry.
Fast Labour, however, had different roots. "I started it three years ago as a play like this takes a lot of preparation," says Steve.
"But the analogy is interesting because of the extremes of slavery. In bonded labour today, they appear to have certain freedoms, but actually they haven't, because all those rights are just there on paper - the minimum wage, the right to take their employer to court - but you have to be a bona-fide British citizen and must have the resources and language skills to do that.
"So the slave-trade analogy has a point because you can see that workers' rights are being eroded and their experiences are pretty desperate."
Steve, who lives in East Anglia, sets his drama on the flat farmlands of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.
advertisement
"The research had a factual starting point: there was a Ukranian migrant who came to Britain in 2000 and was arrested in 2004 and within that time he'd gone from having just a pair of trainers in a Glasgow fish-filleting factory to being described as a modern-day slave master on his arrest in King's Lynn four years later, when he had people working for him in Glasgow and East Anglia," he says.
"It was an extreme story and a topical story, because why was he arrested within weeks of the Chinese cockle-picker deaths at Morecambe Bay, when lots of investigative energy was suddenly being put into the issue?"
Steve has "always been interested" in Eastern Europe. "In student times, I travelled to Hungary and Poland when I was a self-deceiving Communist, hoping to see everyone smiling," he says. "But also I've always been fascinated by British identity, and this play offered a way in.
"Often British identity is defined in a negative way, and the problem is when identity is not out in the open, whereas in somewhere like Yorkshire it's very much out there."
Steve was keen to avoid presenting migrant workers as merely victims.
"Obviously what happened at Morecambe Bay was a tragedy, but often migrants are the brightest and best, they're hard-working and innovative, and if circumstances take them beyond the law, then they will risk it," he says.
"If the play does offer a moral view, it does it implicitly. There are lot of moral views expressed by those in an immoral position. One of the things that became apparent to me as I was writing it was that it's a story familiar to the English working-class. It's never been fun being a rural worker.
"But we're in a culture where we want everything, which is reflected in the title: Fast Labour, fast food, fast culture, in a world driven by supermarkets.
"Supermarkets are the beast that feeds off everyone in this mania, and the main morality of the play is to say that we have to be honest about this situation. Our illusions are that it can be controlled when in fact people are getting hurt by what's happening."
Fast Labour, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until May 17. Box office: 0113 213 7700.
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
Print
Email this
Comment
