An award-winning play about a queer South Asian love story in the context of the UK’s asylum system is wowing audiences in London.

‘The P Word’, a romantic comedy, has returned with its original cast to the Bush Theatre in London. The original production won an Olivier Award in 2023.

The play’s writer and one of the cast Waleed Akhtar said he had hoped the story would feel outdated by now.

“There was such an appetite to bring it back at this time because it seems these issues just haven’t gone away,” Akhtar told UK media.

“I had a naive hope that these policies towards queer asylum seekers would change and these issues wouldn’t have been in the zeitgeist so much. But it’s been a horror show watching the last three-and-a-half years, and the play has become even more relevant,” he said.

The story follows the relationship between Zafar, played by Esh Alladi, an asylum seeker who has fled persecution in Pakistan, and Akhtar’s Billy, a promiscuous British-Pakistani man who has grown up in London.

Zafar and Billy’s love story unfolds across the backdrop of the British asylum system. The play addresses the emotional trauma asylum seekers experience when attempting to obtain refugee status in the UK, reflecting the fallout from successive governments’ policies around cutting migration.

Akhtar has said he hopes the play will help to humanise the experiences of refugees and shift public consciousness.

“Too often these people have been demonised and scapegoated. Hopefully, this is us taking back that narrative and ideally it will motivate people to go out and change the world around them,” he said.

“Sadly, the experience of asylum seekers and what they go through has not gotten better. With this play, we have the opportunity to give a much more in-depth, nuanced emotional experience and people can really get into the heart and mind of someone who is actually experiencing something like this. It puts a human face on things that are usually just news stories.”

When writing the play, Akhtar said he wanted to challenge misconceptions about the Muslim community, as well as challenge prejudices within the queer community.

“On the issue of homosexuality, there isn’t one Muslim opinion because the community doesn’t exist in that way. It isn’t a monolith and there are lots of varying opinions,” he said. 

“In the same way, the queer community isn’t a utopia. It has its pluses and its minuses, and racism and misogyny exist in those places too. We don’t see that often enough.”

Akhtar said he wanted the play’s audience to experience a range of emotions.

“I wanted to lure people in with some jokes and them make people think about politics of migration,” he says.