Zainab Hasan: a remarkable star calling time on stereotypes | Stage

The nation’s theatres may be dark, but in a new series of fortnightly articles we are shining a light on arresting stage talent across the breadth of the industry. The actors, writers, directors, designers and others we’ll be profiling are not necessarily new faces – many have been grafting for years – but they all deserve the spotlight for their virtuosity. We start with Zainab Hasan, an actor who has battled to break into a sometimes elite and exclusive industry, and who has proved herself, time and again, to be a remarkably intelligent performer.

When Hasan was training in youth theatre, with ambitions to become a professional actor, an influential industry figure told her that she was “too fat” to ever make it. “His words stuck with me,” she says. “I was told that multiple times.”

It has taken “a lot of time and self-care to be at peace with who I am and what I look like,” she says. In the past decade she has been exceptionally versatile, performing in wide-ranging and acclaimed productions, from Phyllida Lloyd’s celebrated Shakespeare Trilogy, to plays with the Royal Shakespeare Company and alongside Maxine Peake at the National Theatre.

Hasan is of Indian Muslim heritage. Her mother is Indian born, her father mixed-race and raised in apartheid-era South Africa. She grew up in Southall, west London, and developed a passion for acting at school in Harrow. After a degree in English and drama, she got a place on the National Youth Theatre’s Rep Company course: “It gave me my platform for entering the industry.”

Even so, doors didn’t open easily until Anna Niland, associate director of NYT, introduced her to an agent. Hasan puts some of the struggle down to judgments made on women in acting: “The industry is tough and tougher for people who look like me.”

But working on Henry IV in 2014 was transformative. “It was an all-woman cast and diverse in every sense of the word. Being on the job with such incredible women, and with a woman as incredible as Phyllida Lloyd at its helm, really made me think about what it means to take up space as a woman, and not apologise for taking up space. Something switched in my mind. I knew I couldn’t ever play the brown woman with two lines who is the cleaner.”

Her experience of working with the director Sacha Wares on Boy at the Almeida was just as extraordinary. “She is another exceptional female director and is all about championing diversity and a range of physical bodies.”

More recently, Hasan has made forays into writing. While performing in the RSC’s Tartuffe, written by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto, which transposed Molière’s drama to a Muslim Pakistani community in Birmingham (“The characters were complex and didn’t pander to any stereotypes”), Hasan wrote a rap for the end of the show. In June 2019, she wrote and performed Equal Measure, a powerful verse monologue, commissioned by the Donmar, about racism, white feminism and Islamophobia.

I knew I couldn’t ever play the brown woman with two lines who is the cleaner

Until the first lockdown last year, she had been performing in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin at the National, and she gave a charming turn as a millennial in love at the Royal Court’s immersive Living Newspaper in between lockdowns.