REVIEW: What Shadows, Park Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Ian McDiarmid as Enoch Powell in What Shadows. Photo: Ellie Kurtz What Shadows

Park Theatre

Four stars

Book Tickets

Ever since his notorious “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, Enoch Powell has been demonised as a spokesman for far-right racism. Using language such as "wide-grinning picaninnies", his warnings about the impact of immigration and its impact on England resonated with many people at the time but was instantly condemned by senior Tories, dashing his hopes of a high-flying political career. In What Shadows, Chris Hannan makes no apologies for these views but seeks to put Powell's speech in the context of his times and background.

The play is set in the late 1960s, where we follow Powell's rise and fall, and 1992 where a British academic, Rose Cruickshank, is exploring her Afro-Caribbean roots for a book on racial identity. Through these two threads, the play opens up into a broader examination of issues around race and identity. Although set 50 and 25 years in the past, its themes are powerfully topical in the fall-out from last year's EU referendum. It particularly addresses questions over how to deal with people whose views we consider offensively racist, especially when accusing them of being ignorant or like animals - the tone and terminology that many of them use to describe immigrants.

Hannan provides no easy answers but throws up plenty of questions. It is a seriously meaty play, full of challenging ideas, brought to life through a strong cast and Roxana Silbert's well-paced direction. Amelia Donkor is earnestly intense as Rose alongside Joanne Pearce as both plain-talking fellow academic Sofia Nicol and Powell's ever-loyal wife, Pamela. Nicholas Le Prevost conveys the anguish of left-leaning Clem Jones, the real-life Wolverhampton Express & Star editor whose friendship with Powell is tested when confronted with his extreme views. Paula Wilcox is excellent as both Jones's wife and Grace Hughes - a character inspired by a racist Wolverhampton woman mentioned in the "rivers of blood" speech. They are well supported by Ameet Chana and Waleed Akhtar as Grace's neighbours but the heart of the production is Ian McDiarmid as Powell. He gives a masterful performance as the politician, turning the demon into a more complex individual, driven by conviction and a belief in protecting his idea of English identity but later burdened by his failed political career and the onset of Parkinson's disease. As Powell says, "I was a storm. I was also a man entirely alone in a storm. There were forces beyond my control and I was one of them."

It is no criticism but a shame that the play does not emphasise the impact that Powell’s speech had at the time, including dockers going on strike in support of him and a reported rise in racist attacks. It also does not mention that, despite opinion polls showing that up to three-quarters of Britons backed Powell’s speech, Conservative leader Ted Heath sacked him from his shadow cabinet – a contrast to 21st-century Tory leaders who have responded to these far-right views by assimilating them in their policies. But there is plenty packed into this thought-provoking play to demonstrate how Powell and his views continue to reverberate through British politics half a century later.

Running to October 28, 2017

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