The P Word

Zafar flees homophobic persecution in Pakistan to seek asylum in the UK. Londoner Bilal (or Billy as he prefers to be known) is ground down by years of Grindr and the complexity of being a brown gay man. In Soho, at 2 a.m., parallel worlds collide-and Zafar and Billy’s lives are about to change forever.

About the playwright 

Waleed Akhtar

Actor and writer Waleed Akhtar was inspired to try playwriting in his early thirties, not by the work that he was seeing on stage, but by the work that he was not. 

“I felt like I was being written about by people not from the community I am from,” Akhtar explains. “I wanted to see plays written with a Queer, Muslim lens, and I wasn’t seeing any, so I had to start writing them myself. I’ve seen a lot of theatre, but I don’t think I had ever come across a play where two Brown men fall in love or seen a play in which two Brown men kiss until I wrote one.” 

The play Akhtar wrote – and starred in alongside Esh Alladi – is The P Word, a two-handed love story about a British Pakistani and a Pakistani asylum seeker, which ran to acclaim at the Bush Theatre in September. Time Out’s Alice Saville called it a “gorgeous, devastating new play” and The Guardian’s Arifa Akbar called it an “irresistible” show that “bewitches with hope, romance and heart.” Akhtar was born and raised in East London, where he still lives today. He did bits and bobs of drama as a child – he remembers reading Debbie Tucker Green’s Dirty Butterfly, and seeing her play Stoning Mary as a teenager – but decided to study Broadcast Journalism at University. “That didn’t happen,” he laughs. “I did an acting class in the evening, though, and everything went from there.”

“I was in my early twenties when I started taking acting seriously,” Akhtar continues. “I couldn’t afford to do an MA at a drama school or anything, but I did a lot of workshops and training at The Actors Centre, and then I just trained on the job, really, and did things my own way. Looking back, it was probably more difficult than going to drama school, but it made me more robust, too.”

Over the next few years, Akhtar did a variety of jobs, on stage and screen. He appeared in the Nottingham Playhouse adaptation of The Kite Runner and Ishy Din’s play Wipers at Leicester Curve, as well as the film “Salmon Fishing In The Yemen” and the “Holy Trinity of TV medical dramas”, Casualty, Holby City and Doctors. He did a lot of comedy improv, and sketch shows, too, eventually contributing to BBC Three’s Famalam, as well as BBC Radio 4 series Sketchtopia and Newsjack.

– Interview by Fergus Morgan at The Crush Bar

About the moderator

Micah Winter-Cole 

info to come