The Estate at the National Theatre
Inheritance, with its tangled webs of loyalty, betrayal, greed and heartbreak, has long been irresistible to dramatists. From Chekhov’s languid demise of aristocracy in The Cherry Orchard to Shakespeare’s fractious familial divisions in King Lear, few topics offer such ready-made drama. Shaan Sahota’s debut play, The Estate, now on stage at the National Theatre, adds a new perspective to this tradition, exploring the complexities of a South Asian British family as they navigate the painful consequences of passing down wealth and legacy across generations.
Initially, one might mistake The Estate for a biting political satire reminiscent of The Thick of It. At the heart of it is Angad Singh, played with electrifying complexity by Adeel Akhtar, a rising politician whose sudden opportunity to ascend to party leadership arrives inconveniently at the moment of his father’s death. Singh, a figure loosely echoing the aspirational arc of Rishi Sunak, is a privately educated, upwardly mobile MP, husband to a rich woman, and son of a self-made immigrant whose wealth came through a controversial property empire in Southall.
The play opens at a brisk comic tempo, with rapid-fire jokes flying fast and often – perhaps too often. Singh is surrounded by a communications team that amusingly caricatures the privileged banality of British political elites. Petra (Helena Wilson) embodies upper-class insensitivity, while Isaac (Fode Simbo), earnest but vaguely bewildered, is preoccupied more by protein shakes than political strategies. Humphrey Ker is delightfully unsettling as Ralph, the bullying, faintly menacing chief whip who wields authority like a prep-school headmaster. The jokes about Oxbridge camaraderie, boarding-school bullying games, May Ball memories, and the incestuousness of Westminster power are plentiful. This, however, quickly gives way to a family drama that unfolds with far greater emotional intensity.
Singh learns of the death of his father, who has left him his entire fortune, forcing his two elder sisters, Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Malicka (Shelley Conn), to confront the painful reality of their exclusion from the will. Angad, initially coolly detached, uses his father’s Sikh funeral as a springboard for his political ambitions, reframing the occasion as a campaign rally where he praises the virtues of immigrant grit and determination. But beneath his polished rhetoric, familial tensions seethe. His refusal to entertain his sisters’ plea for an equitable division of their father’s estate leads to explosive confrontations that expose the rot beneath the surface
The first rule about being brown is that we don’t tell white people how badly we treat each other. This line incisively captures the uneasy intersection of cultural pride and private dysfunction. Beneath his outward polish and cosmopolitan charm, Angad remains ensnared by inherited patriarchal expectations and damaging family dynamics. Akhtar’s performance deftly threads these contradictions: he moves with unsettling ease between empathy, kindness, weakness, chilling detachment, flashes of violence and casual sexism.
Jayasundera lends aching depth and quiet dignity to Gyan, while Shelley Conn’s Malicka leans too heavily on familiar tropes of the brittle, embittered trophy wife. Dinita Gohil works hard to breathe life into the underwritten role of Sangeeta, Angad’s wealthy and pregnant wife, but she is too often sidelined by the central conflict to leave a lasting impression. Ultimately, it is Akhtar’s stage presence that proves most piercing, overwhelming and claustrophobic – but this feels like a fitting embodiment of the play’s meditation on inherited male entitlement and the quiet erasure of women within the family.
Like family politics, and indeed, political life itself, Sahota’s The Estate is sprawling, messy and imperfect. It will make you squirm, laugh and seethe with anger, all while delivering an elegant, sharply observed dissection of ambition, inheritance and cultural identity. The result is wickedly entertaining.
Constance Ayrton
Photos: Helen Murray
The Estate is at the National Theatre until 23rd August. For further information, visit the theatre’s website here.
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