The Estate at the National Theatre is a potent but uneven family drama that will leave you feeling angry

There’s a blunt, swinging impact to Shaan Sahota’s first play, The Estate, which is powered by fury at how south Asians are treated by British society – and how they treat each other, too. But it takes a while to build.

At first, this play feels like a wonky Thick of It-style political comedy whose jokes fall flat; Adeel Akhtar (Four Lions) plays earnest MP Angad Singh, battling to land the top job in white-dominated Westminster. Then, it reveals itself to be something quite different: a brutal exposé of how a British-Punjabi family tears itself apart over an unjust will, and rakes over a lifetime of shared trauma.

We open on an unsparing (if familiar) picture of a political elite dominated by Oxbridge swagger and boarding school rugger-bugger banter. Singh is a Corbyn-esque figure who’s trying to sell radical change and integrity to this hidebound party, even though bullying, closeted chief whip Ralph (Humphrey Ker) is bent on playing it safe until the next election. When his father dies, Singh turns a solemn Sikh funeral into an impromptu rally for a new political order, one that puts hardworking immigrant values front and centre. Initially, Akhtar feels unexpectedly underpowered as this would-be PM, lacking the crude ambition you’d expect from a man who could rally for votes in front of an open casket. Then, his ugly home life emerges, and his air of deep weariness starts to make sense.

In Sahota’s unsparing, sentimentality-free portrait of this family, Singh’s sisters Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Malicka (Shelley Conn) aren’t even mentioned in their father’s will, even though they spent their whole childhoods cooking and caring for this tyrannical patriarch. And their longed-for little brother isn’t exactly rushing to correct the balance, after growing up hunched and cowed by his Dad’s weighty expectations. Sahota is an Oxford-educated doctor who grew up in the kind of Southall community she’s writing about here, and her family’s own will dispute inspired this story. That authenticity sings through these moments of reckoning, full of small details that show how cultural custom stops the siblings interacting as equals: Singh might be able to lay on a funeral spread for hundreds, but he barely puts in the effort to order pizza for his own grieving, betrayed sisters.

The Estate is a play that’s full of such powerful emotional beats, without ever becoming a cohesive whole. Director Daniel Raggett’s 2023 production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist was one of the best political comedies in years, but he hasn’t quite worked out how to bring together this more serious play’s two disparate halves here, even if there’s enough pace and slickness to disguise the joins. Chloe Lamford’s design is a literal cabinet that ingeniously slides open to reveal hidden spaces. Sahota’s writing doesn’t always achieve the same feat, lacking the surprise revelations and twists that normally power both funeral sagas and political dramas.

Still, there’s something deeply refreshing about her approach. Often, immigrant stories are nostalgia-bathed hymns to vanishing homeland customs, beloved dishes and departed elders. The Estate feels utterly different. It takes a wrecking ball to its already-disintegrating Southall clan, exposing how tradition has warped them into ugly shapes, and how their hunger to financially thrive in an inhospitable London has eaten away at their values. It’s deeply felt stuff that leaves you feeling angry, without quite explaining what knitted this family together before it fell apart.

‘The Estate’ is at the National Theatre until 23 August 2025