Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“I don’t feel like the author of my life,” says actor and writer Khalid Abdalla. “I feel much more like the world is authoring who I am allowed to be, and what I’ve done over my career is try to negotiate that relationship in ways that I feel are fair.”That is why he is referring to his debut play, Nowhere, which premieres at the Battersea Arts Centre in south London next week, as an “anti-biography”. “The autobiography you’re self-authoring, you’re somehow the story as you see it and you tell it, right? Whereas what I’m saying here, at some level, is that structure of the world . . . creates much more of me than I have any control over. And I am more interested in making that visible than I am about telling you who I am.”Abdalla is best known for playing Diana, Princess of Wales’s lover Dodi Fayed in seasons five and six of The Crown on Netflix, but has also had prominent roles in the film adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and the Bafta award-winning docudrama United 93 about one of the flights hijacked on September 11. Most recently he played the lead in Complicité’s 25th anniversary revival of Mnemonic at the National Theatre.He is proud of his CV but finds it impossible to escape an awareness that many parts he is considered for or cast as — for example, billionaire scion or terrorist hijacker — lean into negative stereotypes about his Arab heritage. For him, his work is in part about disrupting that dominant narrative. He recalls meeting a casting director during the early days of his career in the aftermath of 9/11. “She looked at my face, just my face, and said, ‘Poor you.’ But I’m not interested in a ‘poor you’ gaze. Poor me is poor you, too, right?”He enjoys doing on-the-ground research for his parts. When filming The Crown, this involved retracing the steps of Dodi’s final days in Paris. On one trip he walked to the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, where Diana and Dodi’s car crashed, and then all the way to the Ritz, where they stayed. On a later trip he visited Repossi, the jewellery store where Dodi is said to have bought an engagement ring for Diana. “And I was looking at it like, ‘Fuck, can I go in?’ I was terrified to go in, feeling like I didn’t have a right to be somewhere that is so expensive.” Eventually he called his wife, who said, “Go in, I dare you!” The ring he wears on his pinky finger is a souvenir from the visit.Nowhere has been a decade in the making. Abdalla had participated in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, joining daily protests and helping to set up Mosireen, a media activist collective that documented and distributed imagery of the event and held educational workshops. (He comes from a family of political prisoners: his grandfather and father were both jailed for their communist beliefs.) Three years later, Fuel Theatre contacted him to ask if he wanted to write a play about it. At first he refused — “Maybe, but not now,” he told them. He was overextended with creative projects but also wary because he was still living in the middle of the counter-revolution. He knew too well the consequences of getting on the wrong side of the government there.It was when he had returned to living in the UK that he heard former prime minister Theresa May’s address to the 2016 Conservative party conference: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” she said. Abdalla wholeheartedly disagreed with this sentiment — he was born in Scotland to Egyptian parents and has lived in England, on and off, since he was four years old. “I am from many places, which is why that Theresa May thing is such an assault.” And so the piece found its name. The solo show delves into his personal history with, as he describes, “the accuracy of a medieval map”, through a series of key events in his life and ancestry, drawing inspiration from the eight years he spent living in Egypt in his late twenties and early thirties. It is also a tribute to his good friend Aalam Wassef, a close collaborator on the project who died of pancreatic cancer as Abdalla was writing the final draft of the script. “Deep friendships help us unlock parts of ourselves we want to find, and we help each other to find. And where my tendency is towards darkness, his tendency is towards light and play . . . That lightness is extremely liberating for me, but I can only get there when I feel safe. That synergy between us made for an extraordinary friendship.”Abdalla has always had a relationship to writing — over the years he has published short stories, essays, poetry and articles about Egyptian politics. Though this is his debut as a playwright, he says it has been “a long time coming”. “I think before I spent that time in Egypt, there were deep things about myself that I didn’t know and didn’t experience and I was much more unmoored.”Those who saw his performance in Mnemonic may note the thematic similarities between the two pieces; in that production there is a preoccupation with excavating the past as a means to understand the present. He says the journey between the two works has been a profound provocation. “This is my version of having gone on those deep journeys of looking and searching, right? In order to relate to the present differently. In the case of what Mnemonic was originally, the primary trauma is the Holocaust and its relationship with the European movement, whereas mine is different and more related to colonial legacies.”Thinking about how this piece might land with audiences, Abdalla feels hopeful. “This is my first work that has come so personally from me and that is the culmination of everything that I have been thinking and experiencing so far in my life. I move towards the first performance of this standing in the dignity of that labour, regardless of how it is received. What I am hoping to open up through that vulnerability is an invitation towards a soulful, humane curiosity.”‘Nowhere’ runs October 1-19, bac.org.uk
