The National have bungled their Rishi Sunak satire

Spectator

2 days ago

The Estate begins with a typical NHS story. An elderly Sikh arrives in A&E after a six-hour wait for an ambulance and he's asked to collect his own vomit in an NHS bucket. The doctors tell him he's fine and sends him home where he promptly dies. His only son, Angad, inherits all his property, which irritates his two daughters, who receive nothing. The personality of the dead Sikh is left deliberately obscure.
Newspapers in Britain and India publish glowing accounts of his achievements but his youngest daughter calls him 'a slum landlord' who owed his fortune to 'a lifetime of tax-evasion'. The bad-tempered tussle over his will takes place in Angad's west London mansion, owned by his mega-rich wife who supports the decision to withhold cash from the greedy sisters. Both women are already loaded and they want a chunk of Angad's cash to pay for Botox injections and private school fees. Gosh, it's hard work watching this pack of spoilt brats wrangling about money they don't need and didn't earn.
All the characters were privately educated and the script is crammed with references to Oxford colleges and obscure public-school rituals. The dialogue of the sisters includes preachy slogans about the respect owed to women these days, especially in the Punjab, where female embryos are sometimes aborted by their stingy parents who want to avoid handing out money in dowry arrangements. This issue would make a drama in itself but here it features as a footnote in a weird feminist tract about the woes of the super-wealthy. Bring a paper and pen. There may be questions afterwards.
Alongside the row over money, a second drama unfolds. Angad is a middle-ranking MP who finds himself tipped as a future leader of his party. His sisters decide to destroy his political career and to ruin the family name by telling journalists about his refusal to hand over the loot they crave. Any competent MP could turn this crisis to his advantage but Angad hasn't the brains to see a route to victory. Adeel Akhtar plays him as a whiny, self-pitying deadbeat who wins the favour of the party whips because he's easy to push around.
The Westminster half of the story feels like a second-hand sex comedy crammed with details about improper conduct. Everyone in SW1 has a kink, it seems. Grandees seduce teenage girls. Victims of sexual humiliation make tearful confessions. Several blackmail plots emerge. There are far too many threads here, poorly orchestrated. One scandal is plenty. A handful is tiresome. And the practical details of Angad's leadership bid feel wrong.
He entrusts his campaign to an untested intern named Petra, who doesn't have a plan, a website, a timetable, a manifesto, a slogan, a rebuttal team or even a list of MPs likely to support her candidate. She landed the job because she sounds posh and says, 'mea maxima culpa' when she means 'my fault'. Does anyone talk like that, except in comedies about Westminster toffs?
The two storylines come together at the party conference where Angad is pounced on by his greedy sisters. After wrestling him to the floor, they grab his ear lobes. (Ear-pulling is a customary punishment in this brutal family.) Their attack is amusing enough but when Angad retaliates and threatens to beat them up, it turns ugly. Angad is stockily built and his willingness to assault his sisters reveals his true nature as a vicious bully.
The character is evidently modelled on Rishi Sunak but he lacks Rishi's charm, intelligence and innate sense of refinement. Angad is a graceless halfwit who couldn't talk his way out of a parking fine. The show may appeal to cynical playgoers whose expectations of political theatre are low. Most of the script feels like a battle-cry against the sins of sexist MPs and stingy patriarchs who refuse to transfer money to oppressed Sikh millionairesses who deserve extra luxuries.
The White Chip is a confessional play about a theatre-maker's battle with alcohol. Sean Daniels is a successful American director who quit booze after a car crash that nearly killed him. Emerging from the wreckage, he phoned his estranged mother and learned that she too was struggling with alcoholism. An amazing coincidence. Mother and son bonded over a shared ambition to sober up.
That's how the story is told in the programme notes but on stage the script unfolds as a series of biographical scenes. The narrator is 'Steven' (not Sean) and he recounts his life in strict chronological order, starting with his boyhood in a conservative religious family and moving on to his early encounters with the magic of theatre, and so on. Ed Coleman (as Steven) is highly watchable and the show has plenty of warmth and comic charm. But it's not as intensely dramatic as the programme notes suggest.