IN A converted warehouse in Hackney Alexander Zeldin is in rehearsals for his new play, Beyond Caring, an exploration of the lives of zero-hours contract workers. 

It seems an incongruous place to find the opera-directing prodigy who, at only 29, already has an impressive body of work behind him, from directing Wagner’s The Ring Trilogy at the Royal Opera House aged just 24 to assisting Peter Brook on a revival of The Magic Flute last year. 

From Russia’s Mariinsky Opera directing Puccini and Ravel, to a Middle-Eastern production of Romeo and Juliet in Naples via a Korean Macbeth, Zeldin has been on a globe-spanning creative journey.

He says his shift from directing classical opera to writing new socially engaged works with a group of ensemble actors in London was due to a “very personal, very intimate thing that happened” in his outlook toward what was happening in society and the kind of work he wanted to do.

“I went to Oxford but I didn’t really do any theatre in the Oxford Drama Society. I never identified with it or felt connected to the people I met there who were doing theatre,” says Zeldon, rolling a cigarette nervously. 

“I read Peter Brook when I was 15 and I was more drawn to things that were happening abroad. I had a best friend at university who was Egyptian and he took me to Egypt and we saw exorcisms and folk artists, and this was a theatre for the people and was incredibly direct.” 

While in Egypt he made his first major play inspired by his encounter with an exorcist, before bringing it back to Dalston’s Arcola Theatre. “I was fortunate that I did a play in Egypt that did well and it came to the Arcola. I got a few opportunities out of that including going to work in Russia. 

 “That period in Russia was a bit weird — it all happened very fast. I got offered stuff and I couldn’t say no. I got a bit bitten by ambition. I was really young, 23. Then I was fortunate because I got to work in South Korea and I was there for several months working with a community troop where the actors all live and do all the chores together. They were — I don’t know if that’s the right word — completely communist.”.

“The style of theatre I am making now is very equivalent to the things I have done in the past but it has taken me a few years to get there.”

Zeldin says his idea for Beyond Caring came from a book called Night Cleaner by French journalist Florence Aubenas. “She described a world of people moving from one job to another trying to find a few hours work, not a job. I started looking into this world. 

“Cameron says we have created two million new jobs in the private sector. These are not jobs. These are people who are self-employed who are going to work for a few hours here and a few hours there, travelling several hours to get there and making a pittance.

“In this piece I just show people cleaning, strangers meeting on a temporary 14-day contract, eating, talking, trying to find interactions with one another. 

“There’s obviously a suggestion of the pressures they are living in outside of that, but I guess the most important thing I am trying to work out is what kind of relationships can exist in these extreme situations that exist in our society. 

“I’m 29 and when I was growing up Blair said everyone can have a job, everyone can be a kind of star, everyone can be a big success. And so it was a weird mixture of an incredibly capitalist, cut-throat thinking masked with this idea of opportunity for all. It was such a contradiction, and we are dealing with the aftermath of that.

“So this is in a way a piece about insecurity, it’s about a state of mind, a state of being that we are in as a nation where what brings us together is paranoia, fear of others and the impossibility to find a meaningful sense of collective purpose.

“All the work I am doing now isn’t political with a big P. I’m not interested in doing didactic work. I don’t like David Hare, I’m just bored and frankly I can’t afford to go and see his work.

“For me the most political thing is style. The language you choose to make theatre in is how you want to affect the people you are working for, the audience. And for me it needs to be uncomfortable — if it’s done in a style that is consensual, working within a normal idiom, people already know what it is going to be like.” 

For Beyond Caring, Zeldin has linked up with Unite the Union to bring his work to a wider audience. “I think theatre in Britain is in a really bad way. I mean — what is it for? The reason we’ve linked up with the TUC is because there’s a vast proportion of the country that I think probably feels alienated from going to see intelligent theatre. 

“The other day we met 40 cleaners that are working on full-time contracts — but the zero-hours people are not in the unions. The unions today are kind of unfashionable. I think that’s scandalous.” 

The play was funded by an Arts Council grant, Tower Hamlets council, the Kevin Spacey Foundation and “a few rich people that have a kind of conscience. 

“There are people you would call the ruling class, the bankers, who are giving money. I don’t have any problem with that. I think it helps. I don’t want to make divisions between people at all. The only thing I would do is abolish the monarchy,” he laughs.

Beyond Caring opens tonight at The Yard, Hackney Wick and runs until July 26.