“You have a speech in need of an idea and I have an idea in need of a speech.”

Kala is born on the day President Harry Truman announces the concept of ‘international development’ in his inaugural address in 1949.

Jo has forged her career in international development but is haunted by why, after 75 years, global inequality is worse than it has ever been, where eight billionaires control the same amount of wealth as the poorest 50% of humanity.

Travelling back and forth in time, Kala and Jo become protagonists of historical flashpoints which shed light on how we got here.

From Thomas Sankara, revolutionary leader in post-colonial Burkina Faso, to Florence Nightingale at the height of the Raj in India, to the Berlin Conference in 1884, A Fine Idea asks us to look again with clear eyes at the key story affecting the vast majority of humanity today.

The play is a theatrical response to Jason Hickel’s book about global inequality, The Divide.