Playing apart

In the 1980s and 90s, actor, playwright and filmmaker Nabil Shaban was in demand in film, TV and theatre. He played characters ranging from Hamlet, to a romantic lead, and a Dr Who baddie. Ten years on, the offers and commissions have dried up. In an outspoken interview with Kelly Mullan, he claims that creeping Nazi attitudes to disability are squeezing disabled people out of mainstream entertainment

Driven, dogmatic, dogged and droll, Nabil Shaban is on a mission to make disability visible.

Shaban’s current play, The First To Go, dramatises the Nazi Holocaust of disabled people. He faced resistance in trying to stage the play for the very reasons, he argues, that make the Holocaust relevant today: “People don’t care about the killing of disabled people. There’s still an inherent prejudice towards us, and a desire to see us removed from the face of the earth. There are moves within the medical profession and within genetic engineering sciences for a eugenics solution. They still regard us as inferior, or as life unworthy of life, therefore they find a play like this very uncomforting. It’s a truth they don’t want to face up to, ‘cause no one wants to admit that at heart they’re still Nazis.”

Born in Amman, Jordan, in 1953, Shaban moved to Britain aged three for treatment for osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle-bone disease). He spent the next six years in hospital and says he owes his creativity, antipathy for authority and intolerance for injustice to his childhood experience of disability.

“We have an individual responsibility to try to stop injustice. Disabled people are constantly exposed to injustice. If people become disabled as teenagers or adults they experience a different world. As a disabled child you learn quickly that people in authority can’t be trusted (they’re invariably wrong, they make mistakes) much earlier than non-disabled people, as your life is constantly being ruined by people in authority: doctors, teachers and social workers. Disability lends itself to a rebellious nature.”

Shaban links the decreasing visibility of disabled people in the media to censorship in the form of the commercialisation of entertainment, and connects the lack of opportunities for issue-based drama to the arts funding policies of a government unwilling to be challenged.

“The British government broke international law by invading and occupying Iraq. When you have a criminal government you don’t want people to have a voice to question it, so the government puts pressure on the arts councils to penalise any arts organisation liable to protest about government policy.”

Shaban put his money where his mouth was, when he went to No 10 in 2003 and handed back nearly £25,000 in government funding: “The contract said, ‘neither party can bring the other party into disrepute.’ By invading Iraq they immediately brought my company into disrepute. I thought others might follow my example, give back funding, refuse to co-operate.”

A seemingly likely candidate to back a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, he says: “It would be hypocritical for Paralympians to boycott Beijing. Who’s going to boycott the British Olympics? I was asked by Seb Coe and Jude Kelly to be on a committee to help bring the Olympics to London; I said no way. Tibet and Iraq, there’s no difference.”

Shaban’s advice to disabled artists is “get a camera and get your work online”, as the mainstream media pull up their wheelchair ramps. “In the 1980s, disabled people started to infiltrate TV and theatre and even cinema.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the powers that be decided: ‘Oooops. That’s not a good idea. We actually want to wipe out disabled people so we don’t want them in the public domain.’ So you see the BBC disability programmes unit and Link at ITV suddenly disappeared. Programmes like Same Difference, One in Four, they’d all disappeared by the end of the 90s. There was nothing put in its place. The BBC didn’t honour its claim that it would put more disabled people in mainstream programmes. Where are they?”

Shaban has repeatedly stuck his wheel in the door of the arts establishment, to create opportunities for himself and other disabled people. In 1980, he co-founded the theatre company Graeae, and in 1994 he started Sirius Productions, a film production company.

Happy to join the dots linking hidden agendas in health, arts and foreign policy, he baulks at joining a political party: “People like Brown, Blair and Bush should’ve become actors. Anyone with a hint of insanity – the safest thing to do is become an actor. The stage is a safe place that gives you a licence to be mad. It was a good idea for me to be an actor rather than a megalomaniac leader or dictator. I’d never become a politician.”

Megalomania is in his blood: “I’ve plans to make a documentary investigating the story that my family is directly descended from Genghis Khan. If it’s true, I’m going back to Mongolia to claim my throne. And then America will be targeting Mongolia and its corrupt leader.”

Shaban’s views on creativity are more democratic: “Everybody should be creative, everyone has that ability. As a child, being bored in hospital, sitting in a cot all day, forced me to be creative. I didn’t get a wheelchair till I was about eight. You’re just sitting there, so the imagination becomes overactive. I was always making up stories in my head and telling them to the other kids and we would make up stories between us and act them out.

“It was then I got interested in science fiction and UFOs. I’ve done a lot of research on the 1947 Roswell Incident (a famous alleged UFO crash in New Mexico, USA). I’ve interviewed relations of an eyewitness soldier who guarded the spaceship and alien bodies. It seems likely the UFO story is true, but I also take the piss out of it in my film The Alien who Lived in the Sheds.”

In September, Shaban starts rehearsals to play the Marquis de Sade in the play Marat/Sade, but eventually he plans for his career to really take off: “I’d like to be an astronaut on the first mission to Mars. If I start my training now I’ll be ready when I’m 70. Disabled people would make good astronauts, especially people with no legs; they’d take up less space and you spend most of your time floating around. Someone like me who only takes up half the room is perfect. In all reports on ETs they’re usually my size. They’re obviously saving space in the flying saucers.”