Creating young people’s theatre without boundaries

“It’s about a young boy on community service and the relationship that develops between him and the old man he is sent to work for,” she says.

She does, however, need to be pushed to sum up the play in this way.

Around this tight summing up of the play Khan discusses characters and themes, working in new ways and exploring the ideas of boundaries. It’s the sort of detailed descriptions and discussions you expect when a playwright has lived with a project for over two years.

“It has been quite a long journey with the piece,” admits Khan, a Leeds-based playwright who has written extensively for radio as well as theatre and was also a literary assistant at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

It was through the Playhouse that Khan came to work on her latest piece, No Man’s Land, a co-production between the Leeds theatre and a theatre in Berlin and which has kept her occupied for the past couple of years.

Khan admits that she is not the sort of playwright that is hugely precious over her scripts, the sort that would explode if a comma was removed.

“I knew Alex Chisholm, the Playhouse’s literary manager, she knew my work and when this project came up to work with young people between Leeds and Germany she thought I would be a good fit because they needed someone to work collaboratively,” says Khan.

And how. In Britain the culture of the playwright is vastly removed from that which exists in Europe. In Germany, where co-producer of No Man’s Land Theater an der Parkaue is based, the script of a play is not even known as a ‘script’.

Khan explains: “Over there it is called a text and is considered a basis, a starting point for the director, the writer and the actors to work from.

“It meant it was quite a surprise when I went to Berlin for press night and saw what the director had done with the piece.”

For Khan the process meant creating strong characters with which she and director Lajos Talamonti would explore the themes of boundaries and borders.

In the play 17-year-old Kitten is caught vandalising a garden and sent by his Youth Offending Officer Carole to carry out tasks at the home of Viktor, a 70-year-old pensioner living in Armley who is originally from Germany and is consumed with memories of his past. Kitten begins to learn about Viktor and his experiences of leaving East Berlin.

For the play Khan travelled to Berlin, along with a number of young people involved with West Yorkshire Playhouse through its First Floor scheme.

She says it was a daunting experience.

“The play is largely in English, but there is some German. It was fascinating to see how theatre makers work over there and how the key to the piece was entirely about creating these strong characters and not necessarily worrying too much about the dialogue of the piece,” says Khan, who has also worked alongside Leeds based TV writer Mark Catley on the original play Beep, staged in Bradford in 2008. She also worked with Catley on last year’s Northern Bullitts new writing scheme.

No Man’s Land, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, today to May 7.