I Dream of Theresa May review – willing immigrant’s political conversion spurs stiff debate

Remember Theresa May and her 2016 “citizen” speech (“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”) at the height of her suspicious policies on immigration? Well, here she is back in her former pomp as home secretary, appearing as a spectre that looms over Vivek Nityananda’s political satire about Nikhil (Taraash Mehrotra), a young, gay Indian researching cancer in Britain who becomes desperate to earn indefinite leave to remain and prove himself the “good” immigrant. Theresa May (Amy Allen) comes into his life as if from a puff of smoke, and is clearly a figment of his imagination. Allen does a capable impression, nailing the voice and looking every bit as socially awkward as May but the preternatural aspects are taken further to make her seem like a Tory politician of the zombie apocalypse, walking stiffly with arms dangling in front. She takes Nikhil through her 10 steps to Britishness – Erin Guan’s stage set makes these steps literal along with dangling props and a towering screen on which dates are flashed. Its central idea of a phantom May is an original one, perkily staged with bursts of music and good sparring dialogue between Nikhil and his bestie, Jyoti (Tanya Katyal), a trainee lawyer and activist with a keen sense of social injustice. Their repartee brings the humour and sting rather than the saggy jokes on Britishness and assimilation which are all about keeping calm and carrying on, a love of queuing and talking about the weather. Nikhil sounds like a malfunctioning Richard Curtis character as he apes British banter. It is all way too familiar in its stiff upper lipness to cut deeply and you just don’t believe in his conversion. Under the direction of Natasha Kathi-Chandra, its staging brings clunky dreamlike interludes. Characters come on in smiley-face masks to enact them and they are not as sinister as they ought to be. The drama begins in 2013, a significant date for India when the legality of homosexuality was overturned. An adjunct to the main story is the rejection of Nikhil’s homosexuality by his parents, a serious issue that seems nothing more than a useful way of leaving him isolated rather than being explored more fully. If the nation had a home secretary of Indian origin things would be so different, Nikhil says at one point, and it gets a laugh for its ironies. It seems as if Nikhil might turn towards politics himself by the end. That would make an interesting play (The Estate, at the National Theatre’s Dorfman trod just this ground) and May here makes the point that Nikhil is a natural conservative – wealthy, well-educated, un-unionised. May’s citizens of the world speech – made after her elevation to prime minister – was, in fact, all about globetrotting elites rather than those subject to today’s anti-immigrant moral panic. So the drama seems rather historic, given all that has come to pass since. Her speech seems positively tame compared to Nigel Farage, Reform and the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant fervour today. • At Tara theatre, Earlsfield, until 29 November