They say life imitates art. But when a young Yasmin Alibhai-Brown played Juliet opposite a black Romeo at school, the uproar in her local community was louder than anything Shakespeare could have scripted.

An Asian girl on the same stage as an African boy? Kissing him? Unacceptable behaviour in 1960s Uganda.

But four decades on, Alibhai-Brown will revisit the incident in Nowhere to Belong, her impassioned one-woman show which she brings to Watermans Arts Centre.

"How was I to know that a school play would end in an almighty scandal which would take me off the boards forever?" recalls Alibhai-Brown, best known today for her outspoken columns in The Independent.

"There were really strong traditions of theatre in Uganda. We were reading Chekhov at 11 and performing Ibsen in our teens. And there was a fantastic national theatre in Kampala. But Uganda at that time was arranged to be exactly like South Africa. The whites lived separately from the Asians who lived separately from the Blacks."

Alibhai-Brown, 57, performs a range of characters in the show from her outraged parents to the next-door neighbour who shielded her from their wrath, painting a searingly accurate picture of life before the family's expulsion by Idi Amin in 1972.

But more than just a childhood memoir, it also details how central Shakespeare has been to her development. This, after all, is the women who completed an MPhil in literature at Oxford University just three years after her arrival in Britain.

"People assume Shakespeare is a dead white male," she says. "But he tells us so much about the way we live now. Immigration. Refugees. Race. You are an outsider in Shakespeare if you have a different colour skin. So black and Asian people are living that part of his plays, rather than watching them from the outside as a white person might do."

Nowhere to Belong is a co-production by RSC and Wandsworth's Tara Arts. But the Watermans run has been arranged by Alibhai-Brown herself, who has lived in the same Ealing Common flat since she first came to London and regularly takes her children to the venue. Does she relish the chance of showing a different side to herself than strident political commentator'?

"Completely," she says. "I'm much more vulnerable in this. It's completely daunting every time I step out onto the stage. But from the age of four, I loved acting and would use it to disappear from my own life, which at times was a difficult one. So after a few minutes on stage, I retreat back into that world."

And to close the circle, Mrs Mann, the teacher who cast that original producion of Romeo and Juliet, recently came to see the show. "It was amazing to do it in front of her," says Alibhai-Brown. "I told her not to worry, that what she did made me who I am today."

Nowhere to Belong: Tales of an Extravagant Stranger, Watermans, 40 High Street, Brentford, Friday, November 2 and Saturday, November 3, 7.45pm, £15/£12, call 020 8232 1010, visit watermans.org.uk.