Review by Simon Jenner, July 17 2025
“At least she was eighteen.” A pragmatic aide quips an epitaph over the leader of the opposition’s latest scandal. It pole-vaults the ambition of Adeel Akhtar’s Angad Sigh. A very junior shadow minister, he’s surrounded by a bullying chief whip, two nervous aides, two sisters. By the end this explodes. But will it harm him? Or has he already been too damaged already? Shaan Sahota’s sizzling debut play The Estate opens at the National Theatre’s Dorfman directed by Daniel Raggett till August 23rd. Switch-backing from political cubby-hole to plush home and back, a dialogue permanently wired with pregnant pauses, it’s the most exciting political drama I’ve seen in years.
Helena Wilson. Photo Credit: Helen Murray
Akhtar making his National Theatre debut as Angad Singh compels throughout. His body-language, from nervy nerdy junior, flinching at the memory of the chief whip’s school-bullying carrying on in their adult roles, into someone who thrills into what he feels he’s meant to be, is sneakily exhilarating, as much as it’s repulsive. In between though, he rages or collapses with an asthma attack, reactive to old triggers and new pressures. The spirit of his father doesn’t so much grow in him as punches out like Alien. Reverting to flinching schoolboy at certain moments, Akhtar’s Singh punches out of them in fright. Developed from 2019, events have overtaken The Estate in the form of Rishi Sunak and election cycles (cleverly realised here). It doesn’t matter. This is (literally, we find) the taste of politics which stays news. Even the blazon of “Change” plagues all houses.
There’s a key to how family shapes and the past informs everything. Even the programme lays out code. Sahota’s meticulously itemized mainly Oxford-educated characters, down to schools and plausible colleges, which encode levels of abuse. After History at Oxford Sahota read Medicine at Cambridge (where no-one comes from here). Singh’s sisters get grammar school and in one case Sheffield medical school. Sahota’s also a GP in Southall, where Singh’s father is meant to have built a property portfolio: from being a baggage handler and shop-owner. He’s dying. When the will’s read, it’s as expected. But there’s a long-standing verbal agreement between the three siblings.
The double-plot inevitably collides. There’s small moments when I’m not entirely convinced the mild Angad suddenly ripples with his father’s reflexes and proposes the kind of thing that got him to Harrow and New College and his elder sisters to invisibility: one that’s shockingly out of date. “We had to pray that you would be a boy” ripostes California-entitled Malicka (Shelley Conn) to Angad’s repeated “sacrifices” he made. For whom? Angad protests his modernity: ”I go down on my wife!” and gets slapped with “put your money where your mouth is.” Such one-liners pepper the dialogue.
Balance to Conn’s therapised svelte-angry Malicka, Thusitha Jayasundera’s hard-worked GP Gyan tries peace-making all the way, with a believable nuance. Gyan’s easily the most sympathetic character and Jayasundera’s able to nudge anger and regret, unspoken moments. Conn invests Malicka’s narrower compass with whip-smart rejoinders; Conn makes Malicka look just too pat trotting out her therapist’s notes. Which doesn’t make them any less true, coming as they do when rival revelations over school soggy biscuits, and the role of the whip, emerge.
Dinita Gohil makes Angad’s Oxford-educated non-Sikh wife Sangeeta a lot more believable than she might be. Again, Sangeeta’s siding with her husband over disputes doesn’t quite land, considering her privilege. But Gohil makes a believable pillar of support and at one point, disgust; treading between model spouse and inner disquiet. And Sangeeta’s being pregnant adds a dimension.
It’s perhaps unfair but delicious to have towering Humphrey Ker as Ralph Hughes, straight out of a Tory cover of The Thick of It. History between him and Singh plays out unexpectedly. Helena Wilson’s ‘PPE first’ and PA Petra, all pragmatism and calculating when to jump ship, is one of the most rounded, and paradoxically brittle realisations here. Wilson’s watchfulness flicking like a chameleon to every change of temperature, is a delight. By contrast Fode Simbo as Angad’s less-clued but smart SPAD Isaac represents diversity (he pleads) because he was only a “day boy” at Westminster. Play-off between Petra’s cynical alertness and Isaac’s muted idealism (their eyebrows are raised differently) is pure adrenalin. And Sanjay Batra’s spectral presence adds a late dimension.
Fittingly for an asthmatic central character, Chloe Lamford’s set is like a pair of lungs, where oxygen is in short supply, whether confined or not. It neatly opens from the narrow strip of office (you sense the lack of air) into a sumptuous room set for a gurdwara, or other parts of the Singh’s pristine home: kitchen and living-room. There’s discreet colour-coding and bursts of sumptuousness in Khadija Raza’s costumes too, bright against Lamford’s whites and neutrals. Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting slides in and suffuses edges with a clinical chill. At certain points Mike Winship’s sound, often discreet around Asaf Zohar’s music, is just too much, as at party conference.
Whilst some swerves in Angad Singh’s and Sangeeta’s characters don’t entirely land, this is an exceptional debut. There’s a brief epilogue; some could have done with a few minutes more than the 140 Sahota and Raggett offer. Outgoing NT director Rufus Norris has gifted us a playwright fully-fledged. Sahota’s next work is already eagerly awaited.
Movement Director Polly Bennett, Fight Director Alex Payne Casting Bryony Jarvis-Taylor CDG, Voice Coach Shereen Ibrahim, Staff Director Molly Stacey. Photographer Helen Murray.
Thusitha Jayasundera, Adeel Akhtar and Shelley Conn. Photo Credit: Helen Murray
