Enoch Powell is famous for his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, a hate-mongering tirade against immigration. Chris Hannan’s play is, on the face of things, a decade-spanning exploration of Englishness, politics and prejudice. But at its heart, it’s an uncomfortably affectionate portrait of this strange, bitter old man, played with lithe brilliance by Ian McDiarmid.
One minute, he’s sitting snugly on a picnic rug, expounding on the beauty of Shropshire’s lapwings and sunken lanes. The next, he’s contorting with fury as he unleashes bigoted tirades that seem to cast immigrants as a direct threat to the flora and fauna he holds dear. McDiarmid is fascinating to watch, capturing the contradictions of a man who’s as slippery as the contents of a cucumber sandwich.
Hannan gives him a fictional adversary, Rose, a black history lecturer who grew up on the Wolverhampton street that Powell namechecked in his famous speeches. Her ripostes are well-argued and bristling with facts, but she never feels real. She’s got a weird ragbag of personality traits – drink problem, superiority complex, history of spitting at white women – that mean she’s less a woman, more a straw man for Powell to tear into. The true story is muddied still further by throwing in two well-meaning elderly Quakers who help Powell with his speeches, and a retired Indian soldier who worships Powell to the extent that he somehow convinces a very racist white widow to marry him. Hannan gives an airing to pro-immigration, pro-tolerance views, but they’re far from resounding coming from these implausible characters.
In its best moments, this is a meaty, ambitious play that sheds light on how social politics shape our understanding of history and Britishness. But the problem with ‘What Shadows’ is that Powell was a much better writer than this play’s actual author Hannan. His speeches have a persuasive power that Rose’s rarely do, and that’s more than a little dangerous. If you must air unquestionably racist views on stage, you need to have a rock solid play around them to counteract their toxic power. This isn’t it.