Exciting journey from reviewing to writing plays

No, I don’t write plays because I’ve spent 12 years reviewing them and thought “I can do that” and yes, it seems to me perfectly possible for one person to write for entirely different purposes in entirely different media.

I’ve been providing these answers on a regular basis recently because my play, A Muslamic Love Story, opens in Bradford next week.

It’s not my first play – my first professionally produced, full play was commissioned by a company called Peshkar and toured schools last year, but I’ve been at this for a good few years now. Fully aware that in Britain we like labels, boxes and sticking people into pigeonholes, I thought I better get myself good and trained if I, as a theatre critic, was going to write plays.

Over the past few years I have worked with a whole variety of organisations and companies to make sure that I could honestly answer the question “who does he think he is?” I’m someone who has a real interest in storytelling, loves theatre as a medium and have been practising my craft for a number of years before putting my work in front of the public.

I’ve also been training as a theatre director, but this is the first theatre project in which I have done both at the same time – it’s as exhilarating as it is exhausting – and I’m loving every minute of it.

The three actors I’m working with, Tom Holloway, Leon Clarke and Sid Akbar Ali, arrived for day one of a two-week rehearsal period on Monday looking like rabbits in headlights – mainly because I hadn’t let them see the script until the first morning.

The reason for this wasn’t because, as I suspect they suspected, I hadn’t written the thing, but because when I talked about collaborating on a piece of work, I meant it – I wanted to see what they would bring to the process.

The story is inspired by a few different things – the rise of the far right across western Europe, the fact that the right-wing English Defence League is attracting support from some minority groups by specifically attacking Muslims and a horrific story of some Muslim men calling for the death penalty for gay people.

It strikes me that the conditions in contemporary Britain and Europe – high unemployment, continuing recession – are ripe for hate to flourish. My play tackles that.

I’ve always loved the quote from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage, that’s all,” and wondered what might happen if I put three people who are victims and perpetrators of the hate that’s flourishing in the same cage.

So we have a gay Muslim struggling with his sexual identity, a black British man whose views of Islam are seen through the prism of a hateful media and a white English gay man trapped in the middle of the two of them.

The process of creating the work, improvising around the script and rewriting as we go along is exhausting, but helps create something that feels real. At least I hope it does.

I’m not setting out to change the world or anything as grandioise as that, I just think theatre is a place where people can explore difficult questions. Even a theatre critic.

A Muslamic Love Story, Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, June 7, 8. 01274 233200.