A new play is being written about the day, back in the 1930s, when Arab-Geordie relations hit an all-time low. Viv Hardwick talks to the man who's been persuaded to put pen to paper.

HUNDREDS of Arab protestors clashing with the predominantly white forces of law and order is an all-too familiar scene these days, whether it's Iraq or any one of a number of troublespots. But what about South Shields in 1930?

Few are now aware that four policemen were stabbed and 27 people were arrested back then after hand-to-hand combat broke out near the dockside as some of the 3,000 Yemeni seaman living on Tyneside became embroiled in a riot.

The theatre which stands near the site of the riots, The Customs House, has persuaded Cullercoats playwright Peter Mortimer to base a future project on the day Arab-Geordie relations reached an all-time low.

Mortimer admits he initially fought shy of the project suggested by theatre boss Ray Spencer, until he visited the Yemen in March, ignoring Foreign Office advice. He is planning a book about his experiences.

"The timing of this play is weird because there are so many echoes between then and now," he says. "There's a big academic book called From Ta'izz To Tyneside, which is about all the Arab settlers in South Shields, and a couple of chapters devoted to the riots and extracts from the newspapers and people sounding like today saying 'coming over here, taking our jobs, bringing diseases' and all those kind of things.

"So even though the play is rooted in 1930, when I come to write it, it will have a lot of contemporary relevance. It's quite a touchy subject as well. I've already had Muslims in South Shields ringing me up saying 'we hope this isn't going to be inflammatory because we're worried about the situation'. But I've got to write the play as best I can and there's no way I want it to be anti-Muslim. It's very strange with all the tabloid hysteria at the moment. The Americans almost see the Arabs as sub-human."

Mortimer's tongue-in-cheek approach to life means the book, to be published by Mainstream next year, will be called Cool For Qat, a pun on the radio and TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s.

He says: "The idea is that the book and the play will come out at the same time. There's no title for the play yet, but the book will be called Cool For Qat, which is a leaf they chew all the time in the Yemen, a mildly narcotic substance. People my age remember a programme called Cool For Cats and there's always the Squeeze song for those a little younger."

On his trip to the Yemen, Mortimer did manage to find one or two old sea dogs who had vague memories of South Shields.

"High up in the mountains after an hour-and-a-half off the road in a four-wheel drive vehicle, I came across a couple and one said to me 'where are you from?' and when I told him he said 'you're a f***ing Geordie' and I burst out laughing... he had me summed up.

"I found it difficult finding actual traces, but I felt I couldn't write the play without going to the Yemen to have a foothold on it really."

Mortimer was an ideal candidate to create the play - a recent work called Chain was inspired by the Tyneside troubles of 1991 - although he is quick to point out that this was white rather than ethnic protest.

Mortimer believes little is known about the 1930s incident because the Arabs "kept themselves to themselves and they were pushed into the area known as Laygate and Holborn. All the houses are gone now but there is a mosque in Laygate which was opened by Mohammad Ali in the 1970s.

"They are very quiet people and they had an amazing record of racial tolerance in South Shields until this incident, although there was a smaller riot in 1919.

"There were also Somalis and other Arabs. They tended to adopt Western dress and were incredibly good workers doing things like shovelling the coal below deck. The problems started when there was a cut-back in workers during the post-World War I period and they took the brunt of it even though the British Government was eager to get as many foreign labourers as they could.

"Apparently when they got on the boats, the British sailors would say 'wash my clothes' and dump a load of dirty clothes on them."

The legacy of Yemenis living on Tyneside is that some people still have names that are half-Arab and half-Geordie. "The Yemenis lived mostly in boarding houses run by masters and they have all been razed to the ground, except one where one or two Arabs still visit," says Mortimer.

The play is about a young Yemeni who comes to work in South Shields and becomes involved with a white girl. Finding someone to play the lead is likely to be Mortimer's toughest task.

"Funnily enough, one of the people I've contacted is a shopkeeper in London who's also run a shop in the Yemen and his son is a 19-year-old Yemeni who acts and is very keen to audition. Yemeni actors are a little thin on the ground. We'd really like to have some Yemenis in this play so we're working on that," he says. "In drama you look at character and the reasons why things happened and try and make those personal to people. You don't justify it, but you try and see why things happened.

"From what I read about it, the riot was probably good for Shields because the locals did feel guilty and they changed their ways because they realised it wasn't a good episode in their history."

Currently, Mortimer's working on a £50,000 project closer to home and is about to become a strolling player with his own company, Cloud Nine, in a project called Off The Wall involving Hadrian's Wall. From August 19, the company is staging ten performances in ten days while making a journey from Bowness to Segedunum Roman Fort at Wallsend. It is part of the North's Writing On The Wall project and planning took two-and-a-half years. All performances are in village halls and pubs.

"We're going to have to cast small thin actors because some of the places are rather cramped," he jokes.

But while he may now be firmly back on home turf, Mortimer's travels have left a lasting, and sometimes surprising, impression on him.

Once he met a sheikh who gave him a ceremonial sword originally used for decapitation. "When I was walking away, he whispered in the interpreter's ear and I said 'what's he asking?' and the guy said 'he wants to know if you're all right for money'.

"I came back after visiting all these cities in the Yemen and never felt the slightest concern and then I walked through the Bigg Market at 10pm and there was vomiting and fighting and people roaring and I thought 'here I am, back in the civilised world'."