Shan Khan - Scotland’s great brown hope

Interview by Dominic Rai with new playwright Shan Khan at rehearsal rooms in Holloway, north London, August 3, 2001

British Asian Shan Khan has become the first Scot to have a play staged at the main Edinburgh Festival in the past 25 years.

Office - his first stage play - has its world premiere at the festival this month earning the 30 year-old based in King's Cross, London, massive press coverage.

The idea for Office came from a slice of King's Cross real life. Every day, two men turned up to make calls in the open plan phone booths down the road from where Shan lives. Funny thing was, they stayed there making calls until late afternoon. It was only gradually he twigged they were drug dealers.

The original idea was to make Office into a short film with the help of Shan's movie-mad younger brothers, which whom he made a nine-minute short last year. Half a dozen pages into the script, he realised it stood a better chance of seeing the light of day as a stage production.

When he reached page 62, he found out about Verity Bargate Award, which is given to new writers by the Soho Theatre. Only trouble was, the closing date was the next day.

He recalled: 'I sat up for about 14 or 15 hours solid and finished the play. I fell asleep at the computer because I was so fucking knackered.' While he was still asleep, a friend handed the manuscript into the Soho Theatre.

Shan then completely forgot about the award until last November when he had a call from the theatre telling him he had beat 500 other entrants and won.

He describes the play as 'Waiting for Godot meets The Dumb Waiter - only with drug dealers.' All set in one day, the play's principal characters are Sharkey and Showtime, two drugs dealers who quarrel when a big deal comes in over the phone.

He said: 'Sharkey, the more senior of the two, thinks it's a fantastic opportunity to make some cream as he calls it, to make something out of the deal. It's life and death because they are drug dealers on the streets. Sharkey could get killed for being disloyal to the family, as it were.'

In the production, Sharkey is played by relatively unknown actor Arvin Shah. Shan recalls that he came in, read for the part 'brilliantly' and got it. He strongly believes in the value of 'new blood'.

He said: 'I said to the casting directors: I want the best people to read these parts - white, black, pink with fucking blue spots on, an alien - I don't care.'

Shan, 30, fits into the tradition of actors like Ayub Khan Din and Meera Syal who reached an impasse in straight acting parts and ended up becoming writers and, as a result, enriched the industry as a whole..

He was born in London of Pakistani parents and brought up in Lanarkshire, Scotland. In the 1970s, his family was the only Asian one in the town of Carluke. Despite this and a feeling that he was 'never really accepted' by the local white people, he felt supported by his three brothers, two sisters and a 'strong mum and dad.'

His professional career began as a singer/songwriter in rock groups. Trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he lived in Glasgow until 1996.

An early acting break was the lead in Bombay Blue, 1997, a Channel 4 police drama partly filmed in India, and in 1999 he appeared in Lynda La Plante's Trial and Retribution with David Hayman and Richard E Grant.

Despite these roles, he then found himself being offered 'glorified extra parts' - taxi drivers, Asian waiters etc. He found these offers 'insulting' and last summer turned to writing.

He recalled: 'I'd said I would write my own things, thankyou very much. So be it if I end up being a bitter broken man at age 60.

'Everyone said - forget the writing. You're not trained. I kept on writing. I sent a lot of letters out and didn't even get a reply. I didn't even get rejection letters. I carried on saying I would not be broken. The reason is that I have become a success now is that I have done something all writers should do - found my own voice.'

Shan has also written Freeview, a screenplay set in a Glasgow housing estate awaiting production and is developing an original TV series with the BBC.

What advice has he for new writers fresh out of university or drama school? He said: 'It's simple. Work your butt off. The third generation Asians are inherently lazy because their mums and dads got the shop and sent them to uni. They have got the BMW and they think it's all going to fall in their lap.

'Wake up. Work as hard as your mum and dad did. Realise what your mum and dad did for you. Stop drinking. Stop smoking. Don't go out with girls. If you want to be a success, that's what you've got to do.

'If you are a success, there's plenty of time to have all that - the money, the cars, the house. The guys and the girls are going to be all over you like a bad disease. Believe in your god, whoever your god is. He will help you - as long as you don't ask for money.'

· Part two of this interview, based on Shan Khan's experiences at this year's festival, will appear on this website shortly. Dominic hopes to join him on the last night - Saturday August 18 - at the Lyceum, Edinburgh.