The P Word review: Waleed Akhtar's Olivier-winning play returns to the Bush

Waleed Akhtar's Olivier-winning two-hander returns to the Bush Theatre with its original cast, sharper than ever during Refugee Week 2026.

Written by

Claudia Clarke

Article type :

Critic Review

Published on

01 Jun 2026

The rom-com form is not a concession. It is the actual argument.

Waleed Akhtar's play has a line that stops you early. Billy, second-generation British Pakistani, Grindr-fluent and gym-haunted, is describing his London like someone who has sorted himself out. Then Zafar speaks from across the stage:

"I'm not in your Britain. I'm in another Britain."

Two men, one stage, two completely different countries. Ninety minutes of a play insisting that a love story is the right way into all of it.

A rom-com about two gay Pakistani men in London, one a second-generation citizen with a Grindr habit and a difficult relationship to his own heritage, the other a gay asylum seeker from Pakistan in temporary accommodation in Hounslow while the Home Office decides his future, could easily use the personal drama as cover for political content. Akhtar does not do that. The rom-com form is not a concession. It is the actual argument. Billy and Zafar finding each other matters as much as anything the play has to say about the asylum system, and Akhtar knows it.

Billy is all armour. He lowers his voice on dates, performs as someone else, is dismissive of other people as a reflex. Underneath it he is asking himself:

"What is so fucking wrong with me? I'm thirty-one and I've never been in a relationship."

Akhtar plays him with swagger that slowly loses pressure, and the deflation is quiet, without announcement. When he is ghosted by a white man he barely cared about and realises he is gutted by it, the character cracks open. Esh Alladi's Zafar is his opposite in almost every way. Goofy, warm, still carrying the grief of Haroon, his partner murdered at his own father's instruction back in Pakistan. When Billy complains about his job, Zafar responds:

"It's all relative."

Alladi times it perfectly. The audience laughs and then sits with what they just laughed at.

Simpson-Pike's direction and Rachael Nanyonjo's movement work build around one central image: two men on opposite halves of Max Johns's revolving circular stage, bodies echoing each other without either knowing it. Billy does frantic press-ups after being ghosted. Zafar falls into urgent prayer. Same isolation, completely different circumstances. It does not need underlining and the production does not underline it.

*^{l-r Waleed Akhtar (Bilal) and Esh Alladi (Zafar)in _The P Word_ at Bush Theatre. Photo credit Craig Fuller}*

The structure gives both men parallel monologues before their paths cross at Pride, one drunk and looking for the wrong thing, the other there under legal instruction to photograph himself in LGBTQ+ spaces as evidence for his asylum case. The friendship that follows, cinema evenings, riverside walks, a shared obsession with Pakistani drama, is funny and unhurried. The chemistry between Akhtar and Alladi feels earned rather than written.

Then the final third shifts completely. The asylum system moves from backdrop to antagonist, swift and indifferent and entirely without interest in the story we have been watching. Zafar's situation shifts without warning or explanation. The Bollywood ending arrives and is cut short. Statistics replace it. The two actors step out of the fiction and name people for whom there was no grand gesture, no airport sprint.

This is the moment the play tests its own argument. If the personal story is the point, what does it mean to replace it with data? Some will find it a step too far, theatre making explicit what the drama already said. But sitting at the Bush on press night, with Priti Patel's recorded voice filling the room as the audience left, it felt less like an epilogue than a demand. The play earns it because for ninety minutes it has refused to treat Billy and Zafar as symbols. They are people. The names read out at the end are people too. That is the point, and it lands.

This revival arrives during Refugee Week 2026 with new lines added to the text. There are not many plays you leave still arguing with. This is one of them.