Meet Jatinder Randhawa, a 22-year-old actor who wants to inspire the next generation of actors, starting with Jonathan Lloyd's stage version of The Arrival to influence young deaf kids.
A man with a suitcase is an image that has long since been associated with immigration. There’s a story, told entirely of pictures, of a man like this arriving in a strange city and trying to make a life there. He doesn’t speak the language and can’t understand the street signs or maps, but he is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers who each have their own story of survival and hope.
This is Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. One of the most acclaimed graphic novels of the new millennium, it was first published in Australia in 2006 and is well loved by both children and adults alike.
Now it has been brought to life on stage by Scotland’s leading theatre company Solar Bear and Scottish Youth Theatre working with young deaf people.
In this version, directed by Jonathan Lloyd and his four-strong acting company, The Arrival embraces both visual and physical storytelling, music and puppetry with scenes in British Sign Language (BSL) and English.
The show toured around Scotland, performing both to the public and in high schools, from Inverness, to Dundee, to Livingston. One of the actors, Jatinder Randhawa spoke about what it was like to be on a project like The Arrival and being able to bring its powerful message to people.
“I’m really happy I took this project because it’s about immigration and it’s such an important subject,” Jatinder says. “We’ve not just gone into the public, but high schools as well. Kids have more of a chance to see the show, opening their minds up to the fact that it’s acceptable to come from a different place.”
However, the play differs slightly from the original graphic novel. It is interwoven with more direct reflections on the history of Scotland as a place of emigration and immigration.
“What we do in the show is we break away from the story slightly and we tell Scottish stories about immigrants,” Jatinder explains. “So stuff from Scottish stories in the past, current stories in the present and potential Scottish stories in the future. We tell these communal stories then go back to the main story and link them together.”
With it being a show with little speech, half of the cast of The Arrival are deaf including two of the main lead roles portrayed by Craig McCulloch and Moira Anne McAuslan. They have also worked with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS)’s deaf community, who help open doors for deaf actors.
Jatinder, who understands and can communicate in BSL, feels that through The Arrival it’s his job to inspire other young actors who are deaf and to let them know there isn’t anything they can’t achieve.
“At the end of the shows we say to the audience and the kids to come and chat to us if they have any questions,” Jatinder says. “When I was at this school in Dundee, this deaf kid signed to me saying he wanted to be an actor. It was amazing because he had never seen anything with deaf actors before where it was so prominent in the show.
“I was telling my colleagues Craig and Moira to tell him how he can be one. Tell him there’s a course. Tell him about what RCS do. Tell him what qualifications he needs to get in. Be a part of the RCS deaf community. The boy had said ‘Really? I didn’t know there’s a course in Glasgow.’
“How cool is that? We could essentially inspire a kid to go and achieve a thing that he thought he would never be able to achieve all his life. That’s what we did for him with this show.”
One thing that Jatinder wants to do is write a play that fuses Scottish culture with Indian culture. Another is to create a theatre company for young people to tell their stories and show their ambitions and passions. He wants to inspire the next wave of actors.
“I don’t care if I don’t affect 100 people, if I emotionally connect with one person then that’s worth it to me. Which is why I also want to make theatre for young people."
“My job is to covey a positive message for the generation coming up. It’s not about money, and It’s not about fame. It’s about spreading that message across and if I can do that, on any scale, then I’ve done my job. It doesn’t matter if I’m just a wee guy from Glasgow, I’m going to do as much as I can to make a positive mark.”