Khalid Abdalla is about to board a flight to Australia when we speak, his show Nowhere opening in Sydney on Saturday, as his one man play is touted across the world.
The actor, best known for starring in Netflix’s The Crown as Dodi Fayed (for which he won a Critics’ Choice award), hijack film United 93 and The Kite Runner, is currently dipping his toe into other waters- that of activist and theatre maker.
But then considering his Egyptian grandfather and father were both imprisoned in Cairocountless times for political activism, his father eventually fleeing his homeland with his family for Iraq, Ireland and Scotland (where Khalid was born), before settling in London, perhaps Nowhere was always an inevitability.
“My father’s earliest memory, aged three-and-a-half, was going to visit my grandfather in prison,” Khalid says. Having taken part in the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, which Khalid says was: “a life-changing experience with hundreds of thousands of people on the streets fighting for a better world,” he was then asked if he’d written a play about his experiences.
So come Covid, Khalid sat down in his London home and did just that. Cue Nowhere, heading to Oxford Playhouse from Jan 22-24, at this acutely prescient time.
“I thought if not now when? And the words just poured out of me,” he says. “I come from a family of political prisoners, so from its inception Nowhere was a way of weaving together and interpreting the world in crisis through my own experience, so I call it an anti-autobiography.”
Nowhere takes you on a surprising journey into his own history, set against a cartography of seismic world events in a playful mixture of personal stories, family history and world events, aiming to elicit conversations, and even hope, amidst the chaos of today’s political landscape.
“The challenge was always about making Nowhere a theatrical, exciting and engaging experience, and our favourite audience feedback so far is that it’s a great night out, which is praise indeed,” Khalid smiles, “and I think that’s why it’s being picked up around the world, because it creates common ground for people to ask how we got here and make sense of it all.”
“But more than that Nowhere aims to get people tailing abut the things that are going on in the world around us, so this is fundamentally abut history and stories.
Still a one-man show is still presumably quite a daunting experience? “It does bring a particular feeling of vulnerability, and at the beginning I didn’t know how that was going to be received,” Khalid concedes, “but what we’ve found is that at the end of Nowhere the audience doesn’t want to leave, they want to process and absorb what they’ve just seen, which has been really humbling and energising.”
So how does Khalid balance his activism and theatre-making with the big film roles? “I feel like I have multiple identities as a creator and as a director, but take The Crown – for me Dodo was the first Arab character I could think of that you could really get to know, like and mourn, so I saw the part as a big cultural opportunity,. It meant a lot to me.
Which does beg the question about type-casting? “All my roles have been a necessary response to the world I see around me both culturally and politically,” Khalid says, “so I’m very proud of all my roles. But it cuts both ways because I’m not interested in parts that stereotype my identity, that make it part of the problem. I prefer to engage with roles that push things forward.
Which Nowhere certainly does: “It uses humour to engage with the world, that’s a very important part, so if you are someone who wants to engage with the world somewhere safe and comfortable then Nowhere is for you. It’s a rare experience.
Something we should all enjoy then? “I go to the theatre to have a live experience that’s challenging and inspiring – to feel a deep connection and to experience that buzz and feeling of being alive afterwards – and that’s how we want our audiences to feel.”
Nowhere comes to Oxford Playhouse from Jan 22-24. Book at: https://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/events/nowhere
