This drama about the gig economy and the workers trapped inside it plays out like a thriller. Sonali Bhattacharyya’s fast, witty script finds an original way to tell the global backstory of the zero-hours workforce, joining up the dots from child labour in West Bengal to unethical working conditions in Britain.
Factory worker and aspiring writer Prab (Irfan Shamji) gets his big break when he and his wife Kajol (Zainab Hasan) visit the acting troupe of a traditional Bengali folk theatre or jatra who have just performed in a Kolkata factory back room. To his surprise, Prab is offered a job as a writer and handyman. A former union man, he finds himself doing the dirty work for the bullying factory owner’s son, Dev (Scott Karim). The jatra is “theatre for the people”, Kajol reminds her husband, and so he begins writing quietly subversive Animal Farm-style allegories for the stage.
