Too many themes equals play with too little power

What Shadows

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

There are plays which are beautifully made and staged, yet which matter hardly at all; and then there are plays like this latest piece from the formidable Scottish writer Chris Hannan. First seen in Birmingham last November, What Shadows is a bold and timely study of the nationalistic and racist passions unleashed by Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, delivered in Birmingham in 1968. It’s a play more freighted with political significance and serious intent than any other you are likely to see this year.

Yet despite a truly brilliant central performance from the great Ian Mcdiarmid as Powell, What Shadows often seems too diffuse in focus to do full justice to its vital subject, and more like a primer for a possible debate on English identity than an actual drama about it. Set in two time-frames – in 1968 and 1992, a few years before Powell’s death – the play surrounds Powell with a series of characters who challenge him in various ways.

So there’s his Quaker journalist friend Clem Jones who, with his wife Marjorie, breaks with Powell over the Birmingham speech. There are two female academics, one young, ambitious, angry and black, the other exiled from Oxford after suggesting that some of Powell’s arguments have never been fully answered. There’s the racist old lady whom Powell quoted in his speech. There are her friendly Asian neighbours. And just here and there – in Powell’s final conversations with Clem and the young academic, Rose – there is the glimpse of a serious dialogue about why his romantic and nostalgic idea of England was wrong, and always bound to fail.

Yet none of this is argued out thoroughly enough to offer any