​Nabil Shaban, actor and activist. Born: February 12, 1953 in Amman, Jordan. Died: October 25, 2025 in Edinburgh, aged 72

It was 1997 on a ferry to Ireland that I ran into Nabil Shaban again, enquiring how work was he replied “same as usual” – professional actors, despite Equity’s best-efforts, are freelancers who get Equity minimum for short-term contracts, tough if you want an acting career and a life. I’d just been appointed Director of Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh and in response said we’d employ as many disabled as non-disabled actors in every show. We then spent the next 20-plus years working out how exactly to make good on that promise.

There have been a number of excellent obituaries covering his professional career – his co-founding of the ground-breaking theatre company Graeae as well as work in theatre, television and film – yet ignoring his work In Scotland. But it was here that Nabil brought his passion as an activist, skill as an actor, and fierce intellect together, and it was also here he found happiness. In honour of my friend, I’ll try to fill that gap.

We were introduced in 1985 by a mutual friend Gavin Richards (who had brought Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of An Anarchist into the West End). I was producing for 7:84 Theatre Company, and together we began to co-create a show called Brittania Rig. Nabil was to play a wise owl circling around Britain accurately predicting the neo-con nightmare that was about to befall us. We were flooding the ring of a big top, with an oil rig in the middle around which a harnessed Nabil was to fly. Getting an actor with brittle bones insurance for this stunt was problematic but Nabs explained that if he’d waited for approval for anything he’d have done nothing, so we were to proceed without it.

The radical GLC put up the funding, local authorities lined up to take it, but the government got wind and Margaret Thatcher named the show in the House of Commons as the kind of political art she’d never allow to receive public funding. Collectively we decided the way to keep pressure on the GLC to hold true was to occupy County Hall – Nabil of course lead the way. The GLC welcomed us in. Meanwhile, Thatcher’s lawyers found a legal route to an injunction and our three-day occupation ended.

I say “of course” Nabil led the way because he had a history of personal direct action. To bring attention to the anti-apartheid campaign he’d got out of his wheelchair, crawled up the steps of the South African Embassy (in Trafalgar Square) and covered himself with red paint, watching on as bemused police officers tried to work out what to do with him! He’d joined the Greenham Common Women’s campaign against the use of the airbase by the US for nuclear weapons, parking his car across the gates, locking the doors and refusing to move. An earlier and successful campaign was highlighting the awkward fact that the standard issue disability cars had a design fault – exhaust fumes leaked into the cab, poisoning the driver and leading to a number of “mysterious” accidents. Nabil drew comparison with the Nazi holocaust, which had started with the German state encouraging parents of disabled children to bring them to the gas chambers as part of a campaign to cleanse the nation of impurities. Parents and carers answered the call, and 275,000 children were murdered in the Nazi Clinic for Forensic Psychiatry in Hadamar.

Nabil returned regularly to this theme, most specifically in The First To Go (2009), which Benchtours staged in Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre and, at the Theatre Workshop, the mighty D.A.R.E.(1997) the Disabled Anarchist Revolutionary Enclave, a full-on challenge to the disabling world. Joined by Scottish actors Jim McSharry and John Hollywood, these men challenged the disabling world by whatever it took – including armed struggle. Partly comic, impairments didn’t enhance paramilitary capabilities, but entirely serious, sexy and radical, it took audiences by surprise, touring the UK and then the wider world.

As well as educating the sector to the Social Model of Disability, employing new local disabled actors, we managed to persuade professional disabled actors north, including the late Garry Robson who with Nabil created a unique take on Beckett’s End Game (2007). Nabil played many roles for Theatre Workshop, his portrayal of the anti-hero Mackie Messer in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (2005), was extraordinary and recognised in this newspaper by Joyce McMillan. Amongst others was I Am the Walrus (2001), a one-man-show which explored the psychotic mind of John Lennon’s murderer. In Ghazi Hussein’s The Jasmine Road (2003) and One Hour Before Sunrise (2006), he demonstrated his unwavering commitment to Palestine. When I visited Palestine I met the National Union of Disabled People in Palestine – they made it clear that Nabil was their hero.