Love Omar: New Play Explores Sharif's 1983 Chichester Run
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- Hannah Khalil was inspired to write "Love Omar" after spotting a photograph of Omar Sharif in a prince's costume on a wall at Chichester Festival Theatre while queuing for the loos, and she spent years researching the 1983 run.
- Sharif played the lead in Terence Rattigan's 1953 drama "The Sleeping Prince" at Chichester in 1983, a transfer that also went to the West End, and Khalil frames it as an early case of celebrity casting for a theatre that had just lost its Martini sponsorship.
- Khalil interviewed co-star Debbie Arnold, who recounted that Sharif dyed his moustache darker without telling her; the dye transferred to her face during an on-stage kiss, prompting audience laughter and tension between the two actors.
- Khalil also interviewed the late Chichester Festival Theatre artistic director John Gale and John Challis — Boycie from "Only Fools and Horses" — who was married to Arnold at the time and shared memories of backstage life during the run.
- The play draws on Khalil's own family history: her Irish mother fell in love with Sharif via "Doctor Zhivago," and her Palestinian father, a hotel porter, bore what she describes as "more than a passing resemblance" to the actor.
- Khalil frames "Love Omar" — directed by her husband Chris White — as both a love letter to theatre and an homage to Ronald Harwood's "The Dresser," while a mixed-heritage character named Mag navigates questions of identity that mirror the playwright's own Palestinian-Irish background.
Why it matters: "Love Omar" turns a forgotten 1983 Sussex celebrity-casting moment into the launching pad for a contemporary mixed-heritage identity drama, using Khalil's own Palestinian-Irish family history as the emotional engine — giving Chichester audiences a new play that is simultaneously Sharif nostalgia, backstage theatre love letter, and a rare Palestinian-Irish coming-of-age story on a UK main stage.
