Hopes stretched in rubber empire
A matriarch isn’t about to lose her pride and joy because of warring sons and a generation itching to move on
Iarts & books editor n the end, the metaphors proved too good for Ryan Craig to set his comic family drama anywhere other than the business he knew and begrudgingly loved: his family’s rubber retailing empire.
He had tried to be flexible, because the family dynamic was most important to the story, but when he remembered what the shop looked like, how it smelled and the childhood thrill — sometimes — of serving behind the actual counter, it was hard to get away from.
“The business was meant to be incidental, so I was thinking of any other businesses that could be run by brothers who don’t get on and the impact it has on their sons — the next generation — but rubber became the metaphor for everything else,” says Craig, adding that the set was based on actual drawings of the shop.
A television and theatre writer who’s worked with the likes of the UK’s National Theatre and the BBC, Craig’s speaking from his London home days before hopping on a plane to join Auckland Theatre Company at Filthy Business’ opening night.
It’s his 14th play and while several have dealt with Jewish identity and experience, Filthy Business is the most personal. It deals headon with his own family experience of being immigrants — Craig’s great-grandfather left Poland to start again in England — and negotiating the British class Filthy Business ASB Waterfront Theatre, August 14-29
system.
“It was a case of go to therapy or write a play,” he jokes.
Craig says the shop smell is infused in his memory and he vividly recalls how filthy his dad and other assorted relatives and staff would get working with such material. He got to help out, serving and going on deliveries, but says he was hopeless.
“I’d just get plonked in the shop and expected to deal with customers and orders and things like that because everyone assumed I was a member of the family so I would know what I was doing,” he recalls.
But, like many migrants, his parents wanted better for their sons so Craig was already at one of the UK’s top schools, Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen and Matt Lucas. He had little interest in following in dad’s footsteps, no idea about how bound family and business fortunes were or the depth of a feud between branches of his family.
“My father asked why he’d spent so much money on my education for me to become a writer, so I had to monetise the investment early on to prove I could do it,” he jokes.
Filthy Business has been described as a “towering tribute to the entrepreneurial outsiders who have become the beating heart of every modern society”.
Craig says it loosely follows a trajectory into Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s, the waxing and waning of fortunes across class lines.
Originally, he focused on the experiences of his father but found the play had more heart if he chose to make a family matriarch, based on an amalgamation of aunts, the central character. It allowed Craig to create a world within a world where Yetta Solomon (played in Auckland by Jennifer Ludlam) could be queen.
Set in East London in 1968, Solomon has survived the unsurvivable, toiled in sweatshops to make her way in the world and, having built a mini-empire out of nothing, isn’t about to lose it because of unreliable, warring sons and a younger generation who can’t wait to move on.
Determined to protect the legacy of her shop, how far will she go to keep the business in the family and the family in the business? Filthy Business, of other stuff to do. Half the time the TV’s on, no one’s really watching it. Not the way I’d fully invest myself in, say, The Handmaid’s Tale.
It’s just on, and in the meantime, everyone’s running around cooking, knitting, reading or playing games on the iPad. Sometimes it gets left on when they go out “so the dog can watch it”. They’ve even been known to put on the TV just so they have something to put them to sleep. Having seen what I’ve seen during this past week, it’s little wonder.
The one plus side of all this is I’m now a lot more grateful for how far we’ve come. And by “how far we’ve come”, I mean “the internet and my Chromecast”.