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The title ‘Coming Up’ came out of a conversation I had with director Brigid Lamour in 2008. I was pitching ideas for new plays to her and had got through my top two without much joy – so started talking about a recent trip I had made to India to visit family, my first in 12 years; noting how different it was to the place I remembered from childhood holidays in the 1970s. I mentioned to her, in passing, that Indian guests visiting the UK in the 70s and 80s would often use the phrase ‘India is coming up’, in reference to the increasing variety of modern/western goods and services that were becoming available there. It is from here that this project began.

If in the 1970s ‘Coming Up’ was more an expression of India’s aspirations, by the time I went in 2008, evidence of India’s ‘rise’ was on open display in the malls, the upscale restaurants, the call centres. I noticed in my family, that this rapid rate of development had created a new middle class: the number of cars they owned, the foreign holidays they were planning, their expanding property portfolios. Still at the same time, the old trappings were there – most significantly the poverty, in all its manifestations be it homelessness or street children. I also asked myself, even if India’s GDP had ballooned, what about social attitudes? Was culture so quick and easy to change? What were current day attitudes towards women?

Into this melting pot, went Alan, the protagonist, a British Asian, an ‘English’ Indian born here, brought up by parents born there, one of us, wanting to make a quick buck, while needing what we all need – love, understanding, and above all, connection.

And so the story began . . .