Review of ‘I Dream of Theresa May’ – Migrant-wanted political shift sparks intense debate | stage

Remember Theresa May’s “Citizen” speech in 2016 (“If you think you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”) at the height of her questionable immigration policies?

Well, she’s back to her former glory as Home Secretary, appearing as a looming specter in Vivek Nityananda’s political satire about Nikhil (Taarash Mehrotra), a young gay Indian cancer survivor in Britain, who becomes desperate to take indefinite leave to stay and prove himself as a ‘good’ migrant.

Theresa May (Amy Allen) enters his life as if from a puff of smoke, clearly a figment of his imagination. Allen makes a strong impression, anchoring her voice and looking every bit as socially awkward as May, but the supernatural aspects are developed even further to make her look like a Tory politician in a zombie apocalypse, walking stiffly with her arms dangling in front of her.

Nikhil takes her ten steps towards British identity – Erin Gowan Theater Group makes these steps literal alongside dangling props and a towering screen on which dates flash. Its central conceit of Phantom Mai is original, playfully delivered with bursts of music and good sparring dialogue between Nikhil and his best friend Jyoti (Tanya Katyal), a trainee lawyer and activist with a keen sense of social injustice. Their actor brings the humor and wit rather than loose jokes about British identity and assimilation that are all about keeping calm and carrying on and loving standing in line and talking about the weather. Nikhil looks like a flawed Richard Curtis character as he imitates British banter. It’s too familiar with his stiff upper lip to cut deep and you don’t believe in his transformation.

Under the direction of Natasha Cathy Chandra, his show offers strange, dream-like interludes. The characters come with smiley face masks to represent them and they are not as evil as they could be.

The drama begins in 2013, an important date for India when homosexuality was delegitimized. Ancillary to the main story is Nikhil’s homosexuality being disapproved by his parents, a serious issue that seems to be little more than a useful way to leave him isolated rather than fully explored.

If the nation had a Home Minister of Indian origin, things would be very different, says Nikhil at one point, drawing laughs with his irony. It seems as if Nikhil may move towards politics himself by the end. This would make an interesting play (The Estate, in the National Theater’s Dorfman Theater, trod only this ground) and May points out here that Nikhil is a natural conservative — wealthy, well-educated, and non-unionized.

In fact, May’s “Citizens of the World” speech – delivered after her elevation to the position of Prime Minister – was about globe-trotting elites rather than those subject to today’s anti-immigrant moral panic. So the drama seems somewhat historical, given everything that’s happened since. Her rhetoric seems positively subdued compared to Nigel Farage, reform and mainstream anti-immigrant fervor today.