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Though contrived in parts, Shaan Sahota’s debut play about a British Sikh politician wrestling with his family and his desire to lead his party is an absolute blast. It’s anchored by an extraordinary performance from Adeel Akhtar, in which emotion seems to possess and convulse his wiry body. Wildly funny, sometimes shocking, occasionally absurd, Daniel Raggett’s shouty, kinetic, music-studded production is a hell of a ride.
We’re never told which party – currently in opposition - Akhtar’s Angad represents as the MP for Reading Central. There are echoes of Rishi Sunak in his private-school education and financially advantageous marriage, and of Sadiq Khan in his invocations of his baggage-handler father and his aspirational “story”. Sahota is interested – among much else - in the way non-white people are expected to perform in white-coded spaces, irrespective of political leanings.
The resignation of the party leader over a sex scandal opens a path for Angad as the candidate representing change and authenticity. But it coincides with the death of his dad, whose legacy – a fortune’s worth of slum properties he gradually amassed in Southall – reopens historic fault-lines in Angad’s relationships with his two sisters, a GP and an expat trophy wife. (Sahota is herself a doctor in Southall.)
There’s a hell of a lot going on here. Alongside the personal and political wrangling, there’s a running gag about how the upper echelons of British society – white, black or brown - all attended the same schools and colleges. Fode Simbo as Angad’s SPAD Isaac insists he represents diversity because he was only a “day boy” at Westminster. There’s also a healthy undertow of smut, including a tickling fetish and a story involving a digestive biscuit. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s how the past shapes and potentially sabotages a person.
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“The first rule about being brown is that we don’t tell white people how sh*t we treat each other,” Angad says at one point to Humphrey Ker’s domineering whip Ralph (who was also his contemporary at Harrow). For all his deference to his rich, pregnant, non-Sikh wife Sangeeta (Dinita Gohil) he can’t entirely escape the old, sexist codes of the Punjab or the bullying dynamics he absorbed at home and at school.
Although Angad’s treatment of his siblings doesn’t always ring true, Akhtar chillingly reveals the suppressed violence that lurks within the mild-mannered, please-all politician. This, too, was inherited from the father. Akhtar crackles with energy and expression: you can’t keep your eyes off him. Though better-known for his TV work, including Sherwood and Murdered By My Father, he’s one of the most compelling stage actors working today.
Though the character of world-weary medic Gyan (the always-excellent Thusitha Jayasundera) is fully-fleshed, the glossy Malicka (Shelley Conn) is an underwritten assemblage of anger and neurosis. Though Gohil invests Sangeeta with spirit, her character is purely functional – someone for the others to argue with in their bitter, overlapping rows.
The bantz between Isaac and his ruthlessly pragmatic posho colleague Petra (Helena Wilson) could come straight from The Thick of It. Ker is very funny as the furiously vaping Ralph but it feels a bit of a cheap shot - and an obvious metaphor – to cast an actor who towers so massively over the physically slight Akhtar. Like life and politics, Sahota’s play is messy but it’s a bracingly vibrant debut and I absolutely loved it.
National Theatre Dorfman, to Aug 23; nationaltheatre.org.uk
