Mainstream dreams

WITH the curtain up on Midnight's Children and Andrew Lloyd- Webber's Bombay Dreams playing to packed houses, British Asian actors have never been so big on the London stage. "Two major West End productions with all-Asian casts wouldn't have happened even five years ago," says Meera Syal, who wrote the book of Bombay Dreams. But while the breakthrough is real, Syal worries about typecasting. It's fine to have Asian actors playing Asians, but few are seen in plays that have no subcontinental themes.

Take Ayub Khan-Din, star of Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and playwright of East is East: he turned to writing out of frustration at the parts being offered to him. He kept being picked as a "professional Asian" rather than as a pivotal character. Zubin Varla, Saleem in Midnight's Children, has played Romeo for the Royal Shakespeare Company but feels his career has been helped because he is Parsee and fair-skinned: "I don't look typically Indian."

His co-star, Sameena Zehra, feels she is always typecast as Asian. "If this was a regular RSC production," she complains, "I'd be spear- carrier."

There is another view. Gurinder Chadha, director of last year's movie hit Bend it Like Beckham, suggests that times have changed since My Beautiful Laundrette, which in 1985 propelled Daniel Day- Lewis to stardom and left his Asian co-star, Gordon Warnecke, in the shadows.

Chadha found that many in her 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach "didn't work for ages" afterwards.

She feared that Bend it Like Beckham's Keira Knightley would get job offers while her Asian co-star, Parminder Nagra, would not. "But Parminder's been in a Miramax film, a Shakespeare play and a television series; she hasn't stopped working," Chadha says. "I was ecstatic to see both their careers taking off."

Asian writers have led the way in providing more exciting roles for Asian actors than cornershopkeepers and doctors, and Asian theatre companies such as Tara Arts, Tamasha and Kali have nurtured a pool of talent. Lloyd Webber voiced anxiety when casting Bombay Dreams that not enough British Asian actors had the skills to carry a musical.

Tamasha's artistic director, Kristine Landon-Smith, believes he was proved wrong. "Just as Goodness Gracious Me changed the preconception that Asians weren't funny, he did find actors who could sing and dance," she says.

More than half the cast of Midnight's Children came from such Tamasha shows as East is East (a Royal Court play, then a film) and the Bollywood-inspired Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral.

There are still racial barriers in theatre, says a recent Arts Council report. The stage has nevertheless led the way in what Equity calls "integrated" or non-traditional casting. Black actors (though few Asians) have starred in classical theatre - from Hugh Quarshie's Hotspur and David Oyelowo's Henry VI to Chiwetel Ejiofor's Romeo.

Some have faced unfriendly criticism, as did Ejiofor's appearance in Nol Coward's The Vortex, but audienceson the whole are colour- blind.

Barriers are harder to breach in supposedly naturalistic film and television. TV "casts more to type, not against it," says Varla. Though it would be absurd to see all-white soaps or police dramas, Syal wonders, "how many black or Asian actors would get a role in a Coward play on TV? Probably none."

In Shakespeare's time, audiences accepted boys acting as women.

Theatre is about suspension of disbelief.

Varla's agent spotted him in a Restoration play, and was "surprised that he forgot I was of Asian extraction".

Kammy Darweish, in Midnight's Children, urges directors to emulate the multiracial casts of Tim Supple and Declan Donnellan, rather than the "old school like Sir Peter Hall, who stick rigidly to only using a black actor if the script says the character is black".

Raza Jaffrey, 28-year-old star of Bombay Dreams, feels " phenomenally lucky" to have left drama school as East is East came out. He finds a new breed of directors, including Phyllida Lloyd, "more interested in the performances they can draw out of actors than in their faces fitting".

His fellow actor, 29-year-old Raj Ghatak, says: "Now most characters are attainable." For Ghatak, an Asian character "doesn't only have to live an Asian lifestyle: British Asians of my age group live both lives."

As a teenager watching BBC teatime classics, Raza Jaffrey used to wonder if he would ever act in a Jane Austen serial. Setting aside a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice for modernday British Asians that ITV1 already has in the works, it is no longer farfetched to picture Jaffrey in a colourblind version as the next Darcy.

Changing places

Landmark productions that have transformed roles for Asian actors:

THEATRE Tartuffe (Tara Arts at the National, 1990) East is East (Tamasha, 1996) A Tainted Dawn (Tamasha's 1997 Edinburgh International Festival opener) Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral (Tamasha, 1998) Bombay Dreams (2002) Midnight's Children (RSC; 2003)

FILM My Beautiful Laundrette (directed by Stephen Frears, written by Hanif Kureishi; 1985) Bhaji on the Beach (directed by Gurinder Chadha; written by Meera Syal; 1993) East is East (directed by Damien O'Donnell, written by Ayub Khan-Din; 1999) The Mystic Masseur (directed by Ismail Merchant, adaptation by Caryl Phillips of VS Naipaul's novel; 2001) Bend it Like Beckham (directed and co-written by Gurinder Chadha; 2002) Anita and Me (directed by Metin Hseyin; written by Meera Syal; 2002)

TV The Buddha of Suburbia (adaptation of Hanif Kureishi novel; 1993) Goodness Gracious Me (1998) The Kumars at No 42 (2001) White Teeth (adaptation of Zadie Smith novel; 2002)

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