Citation: Iqbal Khan

"Graduations at DMU are an opportunity to bring into our university family talents from diverse fields and background who all hold something in common: they use what they have to add to the lives of others.

"The very distinguished guest we honour now is a blazing theatrical force. He is a radical, an innovator, unafraid to shake up Shakespeare and company, though never just for the sake of it, but rather for the sake of the audience. Iqbal Khan’s remarkable work as a director – for the Royal Shakespeare Company, at The Globe, and once upon a time at The Haymarket here in Leicester, among others – always challenges, but does not gesture emptily. His energy and agitation stir the sacred dust so that the great plays can ‘speak urgently in a 21st-century context’, in living colour, with a clear voice that knows what and who we are.

"Khan’s belief in diverse casting has shown British theatre a way to explode the complacency that can suffocate art. Above all with Shakespeare, it has enabled Khan to tap into the writer’s grand exploration of human experience and find something new - ‘a richer music … with a polyphony of voices,’ he calls it.

"In casting a black Iago in Othello, he answered questions as to whether the traditional framing of the play truly addressed the world of Khan’s audiences – and as importantly, whether tradition did a complex work justice. The play was liberated, and became new again. Setting a Bollywood-inflected Much Ado About Nothing in modern Delhi offered a new way to unpack the play’s interest in hierarchy and the place of women in our culture.

"Both casting and context are crucial in Khan’s eyes. His directorial collaboration on a fearless update of Moliere’s 17th-century farce Tartuffe placed the exploitative fraud preacher within Birmingham’s Pakistani community, where Khan grew up. It was back there and then that the future director’s love for theatre began – drawn temporarily off course by the pull of physics – and that he first understood that ‘education was [his] only way out’. Today, he insists that directors have a responsibility ‘to go to schools, to run workshops, introduce dramatic literature’ and ‘create an appetite in potential audiences’; it’s something that should be as essential as the rehearsal process and the press night attention, if theatre really is serious about creativity. It should be serious – and Khan certainly is.

"At DMU, we are proud of our leading research strength in Shakespeare Studies, recognised worldwide; our long history of creativity; and our commitment to inclusion.

 

"For his spirit of adventure; his challenge to convention; his championing of diversity; his understanding of education’s transformational potential, sheer love of theatre, and voice and furious energy signifying so very much – we’re proud to recognise Iqbal Khan by making him an Honorary Doctor of Arts."