Approaching Empty review – Iron Lady drives a wedge between cabbies

Ishy Din is a former Middlesbrough taxi-driver on a mission to record the male immigrant experience. In Snookered (2012), he dealt with the aspirations of young Pakistanis. His new play, set in a scruffy minicab office, focuses on the impact of deindustrialisation on an older generation and, while the piece has an obvious authenticity, its arguments are signposted with excessive zeal.

Din frames the action very deliberately with the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013, and it is her legacy that the play explores. Mansha, the 55-year-old manager of the struggling cab firm, is an honourable man who once had a good job in a now-defunct Teesside steel factory. Raf, the firm’s owner, is his exact contemporary and supposedly oldest friend. The gulf between them is exposed when Mansha greets news of Thatcher’s death with the word “bitch”, while Raf enthusiastically endorses her arguments about radical change. But the crisis comes when Raf announces his plan to sell the firm to a rival company and Mansha is left, with the aid of his son-in-law and a female driver, trying to raise a matching £120,000 to buy the business.

It is hardly Din’s fault that two productions have recently explored similar themes to his own. A revival of Pinter’s Victoria Station exposed the eerie relationship between cab-managers and their radio-controlled drivers. More to the point, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat at the Donmar shows how deindustrialisation destroys communities and divides friends.

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But, whereas Nottage makes you believe in the former bonds, I found it hard to believe that Din’s central couple were ever buddies. They talk of shared experiences, such as seeing their first movies when they arrived from Pakistan as teenagers, but otherwise have nothing in common. Mansha talks of honour and family while Raf seems ready, at one point, to sacrifice his son to save his own skin. You wonder why it took Thatcher’s death to alert Mansha to his chum’s ruthlessness.

Din has more success in charting economic truths. We learn the exact amount of capital Mansha’s son-in-law acquires from compensation paid to his late dad for damaged lungs and how much the driver, Sameena, expects to gain from the sale of her parents’ property. Din also suggests that the real money in Britain’s equivalent of the rust belt often comes from drug-dealing: he contrasts that with a halcyon past as Mansha describes the pride he and his fellow workers took in seeing the bridges they helped build spanning the globe. I suspect things weren’t ever as rosy as Mansha makes them seem but you get the point.

Pooja Ghai’s production, jointly presented by Tamasha, Kiln and Live theatre, Newcastle, is also decently acted. Kammy Darweish catches Mansha’s mix of naivety and virtue and Nicholas Khan suggests Raf has been debauched by the greed-is-good philosophy. There is firm support from Nicholas Prasad as the son-in-law who also rises and from Rina Fatania as the abrasive cabbie of whom one would like to see more.

There is much to cavil at, such as the shortage of female characters and the convenient way the telly is always tuned into historically key events, but at least one can credit Din with reminding us how badly Britain was maimed by the destruction of its manufacturing base.

• At Kiln, London, until 2 February. Then touring.