TV PICK OF THE WEEK
Michael Sheen’s directorial debut is an absolute triumph from start to finish. Powerful, evocative, bold, experimental and unashamedly political, it is one of the most original and surprising TV dramas of recent years.
It helps that Sheen has partnered with the always dependably excellent screenwriter and playwright James Graham and with radical documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. The alliance of those three talents was bound to create something remarkable. Set in Sheen’s Welsh home town of Port Talbot, it revolves around a strike at the local steelworks sparked by the death of a young worker who fell into a vat of molten slag at the plant and his father’s subsequent public suicide by self-immolation.
The storyline focuses on one family – the Driscolls. Father Geoff (Steffan Rhodri) works as liaison officer between workers and management and runs the steelworks’ museum. He has never quite lived up to the memory of his late father (a potent cameo from Sheen) who is something of a local hero. Back in the 1980s he was a committed union activist and striker, who never got over the failure of the strike. Geoff is separated from his firebrand wife Dee (Mali Harries) and are parents to troubled son Owen (Callum Scott Howells), a former drug addict and dealer, who is still struggling with addiction and mental health issues, and his capable older sister Thea (Sophie Melville), a police officer.
The narrative unfolds over three hourlong episodes and follows the Driscolls who, after a period of civil unrest, in which Owen is a significant participant, are forced to go on the run, trying to make it to the border and cross into England, avoiding the roadblocks and a sinister former mercenary known as ‘the Welsh-catcher’. The Driscolls are outraged that they have effectively become refugees. “It happens all the time, all over the world,” observes Owen’s Polish girlfriend Anna (Maja Kaskowska), a young woman whose own personal experiences have made her wise beyond her years.
There is plenty of energy in the storytelling, the action moves along at pace yet Sheen also manages to incorporate moments of reflection that are almost lyrical and dreamlike in tone. Unmissable television.