Sacha Dhawan: 'I'm proud to represent the voice of Alan Bennett'

Alan Bennett’s new play, Allelujah!, which opens tonight at the Bridge Theatre, is his 10th collaboration with director Nicholas Hytner and marks the 70th anniversary of the NHS, focusing on a geriatric ward in a small northern hospital.

But the script is a closely guarded secret so Sacha Dhawan, who plays geriatrician Dr Valentine, struggles with what he can and can’t say.

“It’s not a political play, it’s a crowd-pleaser,” the Stockport-born, Clapham-based 34-year-old insists. “It’s an ensemble piece with an eclectic cast, with women at the forefront of the story. There’s singing in it and movement — the choreography, by Arlene Phillips, is pretty full-on. But we are talking about the NHS and the need for room [ie — to free up beds], and an older generation feeling neglected or disregarded.”

Hmm. Surely Bennett, at 84 still possessed of a beady sense of justice, can’t help but confront the crises in NHS funding and staffing? Dhawan looks pained and counters obliquely that the play addresses privatisation, the erosion of personalised care, the NHS’s reliance on staff from all over the world and the idea of Englishness. “In Alan’s plays there is always a character who represents his voice. Here that is my character. Which is brilliant. I am proud as a British Indian to be representing what it means to be English.”

​Dhawan did research in geriatric wards and was struck by how often people seemed to simply abandon relatives to NHS care, while Asian families sometimes “aren’t willing to let go of their parents when they are really unwell”. His maternal uncle, who he was very close to, recently died at home after receiving urgent NHS care for heart problems. “I took for granted that we have free healthcare,” says Dhawan. “But I have realised what the NHS does, and the people within it who keep it moving, the number of hours they are doing.”

Allelujah! marks something of a reunion. Dhawan, the third child and only son of Punjabi parents who ran a fashion-outlet-turned beauty salon in Manchester, had been a child TV actor from the age of 13 but found opportunities dried up when he hit 16. He’d been working in his dad’s shop, writing and performing “therapeutic” poetry, when he auditioned at 18 for Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys, about a group of bright grammar school lads negotiating sexuality, class and race as well as an education system that increasingly favoured results over individualism.

Hytner’s National Theatre production won an Olivier Award, then a Tony when it went to Broadway, and became a film in its original, blazing, two-year arc. As well as furnishing a career-best role for Richard Griffiths as the inspiring (if handsy) teacher Hector, it launched the diverse and stellar careers of James Corden, Dominic Cooper, Russell Tovey, Jamie Parker and others.

Dhawan, who played Akthar, was the youngest in the cast and when asked by the casting director where he lived in London, lied that he had a flat on Tottenham Court Road. “I was such an idiot, so keen on the first day of rehearsals that I wore a tie,” he recalls. “I was a late bloomer, maybe because I was a child actor and had been away a lot. But the History Boys just opened life up for me, offstage as well. I got into my first relationship. All the guys [in the cast] thought: ‘He needs to get laid’, so when I took her backstage they were like: ‘Well done!’”

After The History Boys Dhawan became a familiar face on TV shows such as Last Tango in Halifax, In the Club and Mr Selfridge, though there was another knockback in 2010 when his American big break, the NBC sitcom Outsourced, was abruptly cancelled “and I had to go home with my tail between my legs”.

But he says this second phase of his career also involved “running away” from family responsibilities. His parents’ business was failing and on his return from LA, while filming Mr Selfridge, “I took the reins: I was designing the new space, the new logo, doing website design, dealing with staff. I put some money into it and turned it around.” Having always been the baby of the family, he regards this as the time he “became a man”.

Though things are slowly improving for non-white actors, Dhawan says they, like women, still face a glass ceiling: “It’s worse than direct racism. It’s ignorance, this fear that audiences will be ruffled by an Indian guy: but audiences don’t care.”

That said, he has largely managed to avoid stereotyped casting: “It’s not the jobs you do but the jobs you don’t do. It’s hard but you have to stick to your guns. Being of Indian heritage is a challenge — and it’s a blessing as well sometimes — because being good isn’t good enough. You have to be exceptional to play different characters.” Dr Valentine, he assures me, is far from the stereotypical Indian doctor.

But a by-product of this determination was that he fought shy of taking on the BBC adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera’s memoir of growing up Sikh in Wolverhampton, The Boy with the Topknot, “because that really was me. I was frightened of playing myself, and I have often been slightly embarrassed that I am not Indian enough. I don’t speak Punjabi. My dad runs a beauty salon and is an Elvis fan…” Fortunately, his girlfriend of five years, actress Anjli Mohindra, persuaded him to go for it. He received rave reviews.

His other main role since then could not be more different from that of Dr Valentine. Dhawan has just finished shooting the second season of Iron Fist in New York for Marvel and Netflix, in which he plays the “tortured villain” Davos, aka Steel Serpent. He’s using his own “Manc” accent for it but had to hone his body through intensive training: at the first audition, “I tried to do a flying kick and pulled my groin”.

Dhawan cites Marvel as a company that has learned to value diversity (it produced the recent hit Black Panther), and says that if Iron First or a subsequent project “really lands” and gives him a powerful personal profile, he would like to set up his own production company to tell more varied stories. It’s not enough to have diverse faces in front of the camera: you need diverse brains making the decisions. And it is important for the entertainment industry to keep pushing change, however slowly, in a time when the wider world seems to be reverting to uglier atavisms.

“The day after the Brexit vote my parents went to work and were referred to as ‘Pakis’, which I haven’t heard for a very long time,” says Dhawan. “I don’t want to bat people over the head [about diversity]. The only way you can make change is by moving someone, making them laugh, making them cry. But art has to be at the forefront of change.”

Allelujah! is at the Bridge Theatre, SE1 (bridgetheatre.co.uk) until Sept 29