When we think of deportees, we seldom think of native Brits. But sometimes they’re one and the same. In Hassan Abdulrazzak’s theatrical documentary, six British-born almost-Americans narrate their tales of being expelled from the US after time served in prison. “Is deportation a double punishment,” asks Abdulrazzak, “and do we care?” Its protagonists certainly do, as the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency upends each of their lives in shocking and gratuitous ways.
Esther Baker’s production for Synergy Theatre Project is part verbatim play and part satirical cabaret, with immigration officer Curtis as our sardonic MC and Donald Trump and Theresa May coupling up on the dancefloor. It’s no fault of Duncan Wisbey’s choice presidential impersonation, but those interludes don’t fly. Its title apart, the play isn’t about US/UK relations. And its point about immigration policy hardening under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feels more pertinent than standard-issue Trump-bashing.
But as Curtis, smirking Nicholas Beveney certainly brings home the inhumanity of a system run more for profit than people. The most forceful scenes see the six deportees marooned in detention centres – separated from their children, denied their medication, witness to seemingly endemic physical and sexual abuse.
Should they be getting deported? How else might the system be organised? Abdulrazzak isn’t saying – although Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets a cameo, campaigning for Ice’s abolition. Whereas Curtis thinks Trump has the answers: “Walls work, and walls save lives!”
Politics aside, the case studies animated here (from the woman damned by a single digit on a breathalyser to the man who shoots his ex-girlfriend and claims “it could happen to anybody”) are all compelling, and neatly interwoven. Yes, we’re often told rather than shown: the evening is of more journalistic than dramatic interest. But these are stories worth depicting, of lives sundered and cruelties inflicted for political convenience and the bottom line.
Among the seven-strong cast, there’s fine work from Amrita Acharia as a woman treating her diabetes with crystal meth, Fergal McElherron as an accidental drug dealer and grieving dad, and Yvette Boakye as a forger of cheques turned standup comic. And why not? If you didn’t laugh at this stuff, you’d cry.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 21 March.
