At home with the junkies

SHAN Khan found the inspiration for his first play on his doorstep - literally. He was congratulating himself on finding a "luxury penthouse" in King's Cross for a manageable rent but when he and his flatmate moved in, they soon realised why.

"We were humping a piano up the stairs and there was this guy doing crack on our doorstep.

He asked if we could wait a bit while he finished."

It was the first of many such encounters, as it turned out that his hallway was a haunt for junkies. "You get used to it, but it's a bit annoying, especially if you have people come to visit.

Some days I wake up to the smell of crack."

All of this planted a seed in Khan's mind for a play, and when he looked beyond his front door, he found yet more inspiration.

"I used to go to the gym across the road in the morning and I would see these guys in two phone boxes. The phones were ringing continually and eventually I realised they were using them like offices and dealing drugs."

Office, his play about two similar dealers, won the Verity Bargate Award for new writing last year and, by virtue of Khan's Scottish upbringing, was picked for a week's run at the Edinburgh International Festival. "I thought it was a joke at first," says Khan, 30, whose previous experience of Edinburgh was as a struggling actor doing revue and the inevitable Berkoff play on the Fringe.

Only last year he was broke and struggling with writer's block on a TV project. Surfing on the internet one night, he came across the Verity Bargate Award. "The prize was 1,500 and the deadline was the next day. I'd started on the play and worked for 17 hours to finish it.

I ended up slumped over my computer with the script in a package and a Post-It note asking a friend to take it to the Soho Theatre because I was so tired." Three months later, he heard he'd won.

Unusually, the vote from the judging panel was unanimous (he beat more than 500 entries).

Abigail Morris, artistic director of the Soho Theatre and the play's director, explains why.

"The language is very vivid, and the whole play goes to places you don't expect, and is funny." She compares its tone to the "McRoyale with cheese" exchange between John Tra-volta and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

Khan readily ack- nowledges the Tar- antino comparison, though he reckons he's more influenced by Mamet and Beck-ett. "It's been said that I find humour in the blackest of places," he adds, putting it down to growing up in the small Lanarkshire mining town of Carluke.

"It was the Seventies, and we were the only Asian family for 40 miles. My three brothers and two sisters were subject to terrible racial abuse but after we stopped crying we made a joke of it. Someone would say what they'd been called and someone else would say, 'You should hear what I was called'.

Someone would top that and it would go on and on. We found it genuinely funny."

Shaven-headed, stubbled Khan was, in fact, born in London and has lived here for the past five years. If you didn't know that he was once an actor, you might guess by the way he stands up and illustrates his many anecdotes. His family is from the Pathan region of Pakistan.

"My grandfather was high up in the RAF under the Raj and, after partition, was given a lot of land," he recalls. "Our family was quite well-to-do - they had a flushing toilet even in the Fifties." Family problems, however, led his father to run away to Britain with a friend in 1959, where, after a bizarre twist of events, he ended up with his own convenience store in Carluke.

THE family was completely isolated. "We couldn't go out and play so I stayed in and escaped through TV and films. There was a theatre across the road, where the local operatic society performed. My dad had a deal with the janitor to let me in to see all the shows."

When the time came to make a career choice, it was between law or drama, and since drama involved less writing - ironic, given Khan's current success as a playwright - he chose acting and won a coveted place at Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

Out in the real world, he thought he'd made the big time when he landed the lead in Channel 4's Bombay Blue, playing an Asian- Scottish policeman sent to India, and a part in Trial and Retribution, by Lynda La Plante, another actor turned writer.

"But I found that many casting people and agents couldn't see past the colour of my skin.

There have been times when I have been treated in a way that a white actor wouldn't be."

Office, with its ethnic mix, is partly a response to his desire for true multiculturalism. "People think that an Indian soap or a West Indian sitcom is multiculturalism, but it's not. It's one- culturalism." This view is enforced by the fact that, as a Scottish- raised man of Asian descent, he doesn't feel totally accepted by either community.

So how does he see himself ?

"I'm very proud of my Scottish accent," he says. "I'd rather have that than a cockney accent, much as I love London.

When Scotland play England I'm behind Scotland, but I'm not one of those who enjoy an English defeat more than a Scottish victory. If England are playing the Germans, I'm with England all the way."

Office runs at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 13-18 August, and the Soho Theatre, W1, 22 August-8 September.

Box office: 020 7478 0100.

Copyright 2001
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