|
|
 |
| |
Camden Feature | Review| Fast Labour at the Hampstead Theatre | Aberdeenshire, Scotland | Michael Billington
PETERHEAD, in the lowlands of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, has grown over the centuries from a small village into a bustling town because of one thing: fish.
Silver bodies pour into the port town by the thousands, and they must all be gutted, which means jobs. And jobs means migrant labour.
Peterhead and its foreign workforce form the basis of Steve Waters’s play Fast Labour, which arrives at Hampstead Theatre this week after a three-week run at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.
For Kirsty Stuart, its leading lady, it is not far from home. The actress, who now lives in Shirlock Road, Gospel Oak, grew up in the small town of Pennycook a few miles away. She plays Anita, a spirited hometown girl working in a fish-gutting factory who falls in love with her Ukrainian co-worker, Victor.
The 25-year-old has already received rave reviews for her performance – her first since she left the Drama Centre, based until recently in Chalk Farm. Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington described her as “sassy, sexy and suitably conscience-stricken”.
“I paid him a lot of money to write that,” Stuart laughs. “Unfortunately, because of the subject matter, the tendency is to think it will be quite heavy and hard work and telling us how we should feel about all these people in our country. But that’s the play’s brilliant quality – it’s not preaching, it’s very much character-led. At no point do you get told how you should feel.”
Inspired by the true story of a Soviet gang master, Fast Labour charts Victor’s rise from faceless prole to exploiter. Anita, as the woman at his side, is faced with some tough decisions.
Stuart says: “It’s very personal to Victor. The highlighting of this underground trade is almost a by-product of the play. He has very good intentions but Anita has the strongest morals in the play. She’s naïve but she finds her spine.”
Preserving that insouciance is a challenge Stuart faces nightly; her character must remain unaware of deeper social issues in a play created to inform.
When Stuart speaks, however, there is no shade of Anita: “As a country we have this workforce – whether you know about it or not, whether you like it or not – who do a huge amount of work for not much money. The next time you go to Tesco and pick up your nice packet of carrots you might just think about it.”
Simon Wroe
• |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
