AS AUSTERITY bites, life’s needs are increasingly unaffordable. That’s the underlying theme of the late Dario Fo’s leftist 1974 farce Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay!, set in  his native Italy, and it’s at the core of this new Scottish adaptation.

It opens in a local supermarket, where there’s an attempt to foist worse pay and conditions on workers. But the largely female workforce hears a clarion call from a deli worker that what is proposed is legalised theft and, inspired by this, the formerly dedicated employees grab all the groceries that they can carry.

But once the spoils are home, the panic then sets in. The husband of one of the employees is a strait-laced worker who believes in the rule of law and all property is sacrosanct. Stealing is a vice of the lower classes.

Such key themes could not be better but a weak development ensues — trade unions are a waste of time, all politicians are corrupt and the only option is anarchy and an emotional “taking to the streets.”

This reimagining of Fo’s play is passionate and the stirring closing soliloquy by actor Julie Wilson Nimmo — of Balamory fame — is stunning. Of course, we should all be angry at the injustice of inequality and legalised theft enshrined and normalised under capitalism, especially child poverty.

But the play ultimately projects a middle-class romanticism, where vital political levers of influence are ignored, and a seemingly patronising attitude to trade union solidarity.

Given that Low Pay? Don’t Pay! is touring various deprived communities in Glasgow, that’s ultimately a tragic and defeatist message from a production which could instead be pointing to real-world solutions.

Tour details: glasgowlife.org.uk