There’s a modest but perfectly fine play within Ishy Din’s latest piece. One expects a word such as “lurking” or “hiding” in that sentence, but in fact it’s not hidden at all; on the contrary, it occupies the great majority of the evening.

It concerns a medium-sized taxi firm in an unnamed city (Birmingham according to the placenames in the script and the huge map on the wall of the office, Middlesbrough according to the author’s programme note and the characters’ accents), run by a couple of middle-aged first-generation Pakistani immigrants and largely staffed by their children’s generation as drivers. When the unsentimental Raf announces his intention to sell up, his more compassionate best friend Mansha recruits a couple of younger partners and they make a bid, but all too soon find themselves comprehensively shafted by a variety of different kinds of illegality. Best intentions and high hopes, all brutally squashed, and what happens then, is the arc of this story, and what it does, it does skilfully and engagingly.

Unfortunately, it’s made to look as if it should be doing quite a bit more. This dramatic musculature is encased within a superstructure of social and economic context, largely delivered by news reportage overheard from the office TV (it always seems to be around the start of News at Ten when it’s switched on). In fact, almost the first words heard are a lengthy report of Margaret Thatcher’s death. So we’re in 2013, a generation on from the sea-change she wrought in Britain’s work profile – Raf and Mansha both formerly worked in a heavy steelworks – and in a post-crash climate in which pretty much anything goes financially.

This provides perspective on the older men’s respective outlooks and the environment in which the younger people are trying to make their way. However, every time the bigger picture is mentioned, whether in debate between characters or simply unsubtle TV sound, it invokes expectations that the main events will enact these themes and theses in some profound way or other. And it simply doesn’t happen. It began to remind me of those superhero movies where a praeternaturally malign costume or tech apparatus somehow corrupts or overwhelms the human being within it. In the end, the organic entity at the heart of Din’s play gives up its struggle to take flight on its own terms, and director Pooja Ghai can’t find a way to free it.

Kammy Darweish is nicely unostentatious as our moral viewpoint character Mansha, and Rina Fatania brings a delicious bluntness to Sameena, trying to go straight and qualify to be reunited with her children after a spell inside. But as soon as her brother Tany appears on the scene, he might as well be twirling his mustachios; it’s not a matter of Maanuv Thiara’s performance, just that Tany makes Game Of Thrones’ Lannister family look like a troop of Brownies. The piece so nearly works, but at a time when even political unregenerates like me are suffering from almost terminal pol-fatigue, even this little ballast is far too much.

Written for the Financial Times.