Adeel Akhtar on playing politics in 'The Estate'

BAFTA winner Adeel Akhtar has made a triumphant return to the stage: first with The Cherry Orchard, and now with the world premiere of drama The Estate.

Adeel Akhtar is a familiar face to many, having starred in the hit TV shows Black Doves, Killing Eve, Fool Me Once, Sweet Tooth, and Sherwood, as well as films such as the Les Misérables movie musical (as a delightfully greedy Thénardier opposite Olivia Colman) and Four Lions, which was his breakthrough role, in 2010, as a bumbling Muslim extremist.

However, after years working on busy film and TV sets, Akhtar is enjoying the luxury of taking his time in a rehearsal room. Absent from the stage for the better part of a decade, he recently returned in Benedict Andrews’s take on the Chekhov classic The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse, later transferring the piece to St Ann’s Warehouse in New York. Now he’s tackling the world premiere of Shaan Sahota’s The Estate at the National Theatre.

“It’s a real muscle that you’ve got to exercise,” he says. “What I love about theatre is that we can all sit down and problem solve together. You’ve got this emotional problem that you’re all trying to unpick and find the root of. That’s something you can only really get in theatre.”

His current project is a state-of-the-nation satire in which Akhtar stars as Angad Singh, an ambitious politician who emerges as the preferred candidate when the leader of the opposition resigns amidst a scandal. Running concurrent to this are divisions within his own family over inheritance. Akhtar continues, “It's interrogating the idea of misogyny within this British Asian family dynamic, but it’s also investigating how people handle power when they have the opportunity to do something that is beneficial to lots of people, and why they might decide not to do that. The play looks at why they might be quite selfish and ego-driven in their application of power.”

Speaking about the play’s appeal, he explains: “I was immediately drawn to the idea that it was a representation of British Asian lives that you don't ordinarily see.”

There are obvious parallels to current times, but Akhtar takes pains to point out that Sahota started writing The Estate before Covid and the tumultuous political period that followed. It was also developed long before we had our first Asian prime minister. Will Akhtar be drawing on Rishi Sunak’s tenure for the role?

“If I felt as though I was basing it on anyone, it would really limit my understanding of the type of emotional places that character could go,” he says. “If I'm doing my version of it, then it allows me to be free with the characterisation.”

Akhtar himself is used to breaking new ground. In 2017, he became the first non-white performer to win a lead actor BAFTA for his role as a man who murders his daughter in a so-called honour killing in the drama Murdered By My Father.

In 2025, we are continuing this narrative of ‘firsts’, with Darren Criss making history as the first Asian American actor to win a leading actor in a musical award at the Tonys. Reflecting on this, Akhtar says: “You’ve sort of rendered me a bit silent. It’s upsetting that we are in a world where we're talking about firsts. But I’m so happy that I’m in the wave of what’s happening now, in which people are enacting a change through writing banging plays.”

He specifically refers to Indhu Rubasingham’s first season as artistic director of the National Theatre: “She’s shaking things up enough so that nobody’s too flustered, but at the same time it’s so ambitious. Soon we’re going to have a Hamlet at the National played by an Asian guy [Hiran Abeysekera]. Her balance of the programmes at the moment is so madly exciting and I can’t wait to dive into them — once I’ve done mine!”

He continues: “I can only talk from my personal experience and I would say that there is an appetite for us as a theatre community to see different stories being told by different people.”

Akhtar’s catalogue of work has often seen him push boundaries, an obvious example being the satire Four Lions, which shows the “power of comedy to make things less scary and humanise [dark subjects].” He carefully treads that fine line between comedy and drama. “I just learned early on that you really can’t predict how people are going to see you [...] I have no control over whether people laugh or cry at whatever I’m doing,” he says.

As for what he’ll do next, Akhtar says he wants to keep pushing those boundaries — and if someone sees him in a certain role, “then I’ll have the audacity to do it.” He pauses. “When you’re there on stage, you do think the sky’s the limit.”

Book The Estate tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Adeel Akhtar. (Photo by Sarah Cresswell) Inset: in The Cherry Orchard. (Courtesy of production)