Kash Arshad on directing East is East at the Citz: 'It still feels so relevant and so true'

“It’s essentially my story,” he says. “I grew up in Motherwell, I’m mixed race - my mum is from Airdrie and my dad’s from Pakistan, and we’re working-class, we ran a shop, we’ve got quite a big family, all like the family in the play. I knew if I didn’t get the chance to do it, I’d be very annoyed!”

Khan Din’s semi-autobiographical comedy-drama, set in Salford in 1971, tells the story of George Khan, determined to bring up his seven children the Pakistani way. But family loyalties are tested to the limit when his traditional ideas clash with the western freedoms the kids are beginning to experience.

The play was developed by Tamasha Theatre and the Royal Court and opened at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in October 1996 before transferring to London. It won awards for Best West End Play and Best New Writer from the Writers Guild of Great Britain, and was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Comedy.

Khan Din went on to write the screenplay for the BAFTA award-winning 1999 film, which starred Om Puri and Linda Bassett with Archie Panjabi and Jimi Mistry playing two of the children. The play is regarded as one of the first works to bring South Asian culture to mainstream British audiences.

“I can count on one hand the media where I saw myself represented,” says Arshad. “There was East is East and Goodness Gracious Me and Dev in Coronation Street, and that was our lot. It’s better now, but East is East is still up there as the thing I reference as I think about representations of being mixed race.

“It still feels so relevant and so true. It’s really interesting to look back on what is essentially a period piece to see how far we’ve come, but also how far we haven’t come as a society. I think the attitudes that the Khan family come up against are still around. It’s important to stage the play now so people can hear that yes, we’ve moved on, but we haven’t moved on as much as we should.”

He says the travails of the Khan family resonated immediately with his experiences growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. “I recognise the feeling of not belonging to one [culture] or the other, and being the only non-white face in the school. I empathise with all of the kids. They want to rebel but they also don’t want to disappoint their dad, and don’t quite understand why they have to behave in a certain way when they’re living in Britain. I really identify with the struggle of that.

“The relationship between George and Ella is very reminiscent of my dad and my mum, and the struggle they both had at the time to be accepted. I realised much later how brave it was [to marry across cultures] and how much stick they would have got for it.”

He believes the play has a broad resonance with working-class experience which goes beyond questions of race. “I think that’s why it’s stood the test of time. It is a true British working-class story. The ruining of industry - in Motherwell it was steel, in Salford it was the mills - those parallels are so similar across so many working-class communities in the UK.”

The revival, which is a co-production of the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, The Citizens’ in Glasgow, Derby Theatre and Wiltshire Creative, has a cast of ten, led by veteran actor Bhasker Patel, whose long stage and screen career includes 12 years as Rishi Sharma on Emmerdale, and Samantha Power (Ackley Bridge, Waterloo Road) as George and Ella.

“It’s one of the biggest casts I’ve worked with, and the key for me was to find that familial relationship really early on. When we were casting that was in my head, that I need people who are not only good actors but are also really up for becoming a family. I’ve been very, very lucky that that’s what I’ve got with this cast. They were a joy to work with. They had so much fun, and I had so much fun.”

Much fun was also had creating the show’s 1970s vibe: think fabulous flares, olive-green kitchen units, and don’t even start me on the wallpaper. Arshad says: “Rachana Jadhav, the set and costume designer, and I had a blast trawling our own memories and pictures, thinking about what our houses looked like around that time. It’s amazing that some of the stuff we brought in when we started gathering the set has come back into fashion. We have this G-plan nest of tables that everybody on the production has coveted!”

Arshad is particularly pleased to be bringing the play to the Citizens’ because the theatre gave him his first opportunity to act in a professional production, while still a student at the nearby Glasgow College of Nautical Studies (now part of City of Glasgow College), as an extra in a production of Noel Coward’s Cavalcade in 1999 in a cast which included Michelle Gomez.

Two years later, he got his first professional acting job at the theatre in the Education Department, playing Charles Dickens on a schools tour, and went on to play Caliban in Court of Miracles, Peter Arnott’s multi-lingual adaptation of The Tempest, in which three professional actors supported a international cast from Glasgow’s refugee community.

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After 15 years as a jobbing actor, he realised he wanted to direct and applied to the Regional Theatre Young Directors Scheme, taking assistant director roles before directing his first professional production in 2019. Bringing East is East to Glasgow is a homecoming on a number of levels.

“It’s really exciting for me to take this particular show back home to Glasgow, and especially to the Citz,” he says. “It means my family will be able to see my work as a director for the first time. I love this play and I’m really, really proud of this production.”

East is East is at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 7-17 October. This feature was produced in association with the Citizens’ Theatre.

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