During Rufus Norris’s final season at the National Theatre as artistic director, two of the venue’s three stages are currently targeting patriarchy.
In Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia at the Lyttelton, it is broadly Britain’s white, middle-class manocracy that Rosamund Pike’s trial judge has in her sights. But in Shaan Sahota’s play The Estate, it is Indian Sikh patrimony that is the writer’s focus.
Not that second-generation British Asian MP Angad (Adeel Akhtar) wants anything to do with an archaic convention that in the eyes of his father values his older sisters less than him, the only son. The member for Reading Central, who is also the shadow environment minister, is the embodiment of modern British attitudes. Angad is the perfect candidate for the new vacancy as leader of the party (Sahota doesn’t say which one) even if the chief whip Ralph (Humphrey Ker) is angling for the anointment of another.
In Daniel Raggett’s sure-footed production Akhtar is excellent as the humble, even meek politician whose virtues are revealed to us, and probably himself, to be only skin-deep. Even when he turns to dirty tricks to promote his leadership bid it seems a decision rooted in professionalism rather than a lack of principles. The play skilfully melds family and party politics until the two are bulldozed by the thing men hand down to boys in the name of tradition – the licence to keep women down.
