Nick Ahad’s new play for Mikron Theatre Company mined happy memories of childhood holidays at Butlins

Like all professional writers (at least I hope they all feel like this) my career feels less like a meticulously worked out bank robbery and more like leaping out of a plane sans parachute. I expect every day to receive the tap on my shoulder telling me it’s time to return to my natural occupation of pizza delivery driver (that’s said with no disrespect; I loved that job. And I was very good at it).

However, with my new play about to set out on the road, the second national tour of my work this year (and a third to come next month), I suppose I can allow myself a moment of self-reflection.

The new play, Redcoats, which opens at Marsden Mechanics next Saturday night, is something of a surprise. To explain why the surprise, I need to take you through my oeuvre (to avoid ambiguity: my tongue is firmly is it planted in my cheek while I write that word). My first full length play, Muslamic Love Story (2012), told the story of a gay Muslim man in a love triangle with a boyfriend whose ex-partner hated Muslims. The play was about the destructive power of hate.

My next play, The Chef Show (2017 – the gap in time partly explained by my joining the script team on Emmerdale for a couple of years) was about a Bangladeshi father and son who run an ‘Indian restaurant’ and was about the dreams of immigrants versus the dreams of their children.

Then came Partition (2017) a tale of a Muslim woman and a Sikh man and their quest to unite their families via their marriage. The central love story was a metaphor for the Partition of India.

My most recent play, Glory (February 2019) featured four men wrestling, literally, for their place in the world. Really it was about the nation post-Brexit and how prejudice can poison a person.

Have you spotted the theme? The overarching preoccupation of my work is the contemporary British minority experience and the destructive power of prejudice and hate. So it came as a bit of a surprise when Mikron Theatre company approached me for a meeting about this time last year.

I’ve written about Mikron, the 48-year-old Yorkshire company, in the pages of Culture many times in the past. I always thought they were a – there’s no way to use this word without sounding twee – lovely company. They tour the country by narrowboat for goodness sake.

Every year, four actor-musicians take to the waterways of Britain, pitch up in pub beer gardens, allotments and cricket clubs and perform their plays with music. You give me a better word than ‘lovely’ for that.

So, much as I admire Mikron, why would this lovely company be interested in a play from a writer who had, in his previous plays, tackled some pretty heavy race issues in a not always uncontroversial way?

When I met Marianne McNamara, artistic director of Mikron, she had seen Partition and thought the comic sensibilities she’d spotted in my writing might make a good fit for Mikron.

She brought to our meeting a list of subjects about which the company were considering making plays. Butlins was at the top of the list. Something clicked.

I explained to Marianne that, even though the major preoccupation in my writing is about the contemporary British Asian experience, I am mixed race. I write about life through the eyes of a brown man because that’s how the world views me, but I’m half white – and specifically, half white-working class. Like a lot of white working class folk, Butlins is a massive part of my personal history. I went to Butlins, Skegness, with my family 14 years in a row when I was growing up.

And that’s how Redcoats, my new play for Mikron, was born.

Writing Redcoats has been a joyful experience. Revisiting old memories of my time at the holiday camp has been an utter delight. If you come to the show you’ll see photographs in the programme of me winning the Bonny Baby competition in 1980 and coming second in the Picture of Health Competition a few years after that.

The beauty of Mikron’s work is that it is entertaining, but also it sets out to teach its audiences something about the subjects of its plays. Trying to sneak the research into the script while continuing to entertain has been one of the most fun challenges I’ve had writing a script. Everything – and I do mean everything – in the script for Redcoats is historically accurate.

The other thing I had to do was write songs for the first time. To explain how daunting this was: I was once cast in a musical and then had all my songs cut when the musical director realised I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I was probably tone deaf.

Fortunately in the task of writing the songs for Redcoats I had the help of both the extraordinarily generous singer-songwriter Jim Woodland and Mikron’s secret weapon, the genius composer and musical director Rebekah Hughes. They’ve done things like make my love song about a monorail sound like, well, a love song. That’s not a joke. There’s a love song about a monorail in Redcoats.

There’s also appearances from Laurel and Hardy, Gracie Fields, Marlene Dietrich and Billy Butlins himself (honestly, it’s all historically accurate). There will also be, I hope, a huge amount of nostalgia for those who remember holidays beside the seaside.

Redcoats. A somewhat unexpected, absolutely joyous, addition to the ‘oeuvre’.

Holiday huts, bonny babies and knobbly knees, Mikron’s Redcoats will guide you through 80 years of Butlins with their trademark mix of fun, pathos and songs.

May 18: Marsden Mechanics Hall, Huddersfield.

May 21: Snainton Village Hall, Scarborough.

May 23: Bingley Arts Centre.

May 24: Square Chapel Arts Centre, Halifax.

May 25: The Poor Marsh Allotment, Hesketh.

May 28: Scarcroft Allotments, York.

May 29: Grimesthorpe, Sheffield.

Details www.mikron.org.uk