Play with bounce

Jennifer Ludlam in Filthy Business, a play based on its writer's own family business.

In 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 says he tried to be flexible, because the family dynamic is most important to the story, but when you remember what the shop looked like, how it smelled and the childhood thrill — sometimes — of serving behind the actual counter, it's 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 just days before hopping on a plane and flying to New Zealand to join Auckland Theatre Company at the opening night of Filthy Business.

Playwright Ryan Craig pays homage to his family's rubber retailing business in the play, Filthy Business.

It's his 14th play and while several of the others have dealt with Jewish identity and experience,

Filthy Business

is the most personal. It deals head-on with his own family experience of being immigrants — Craig's great-grandfather left Poland to start again in England — and negotiating the British class 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 so many migrants, his parents aspired for better things 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 un-survivable, 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 and 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?

• Someone's gotta do it - the filthiest jobs in entertainment, see Weekend tomorrow.

Lowdown
What: Filthy Business
Where & when: ASB Waterfront Theatre, August 14 — 29