As police figures show racist crime
soaring in the UK since the Brexit vote, it could scarcely be more
timely to stage a dramatic portrait of Enoch Powell, the Tory MP whose
“rivers of blood” speech in 1968 proved a watershed in the public
discourse of what was then still known as racialism. More apt still to
present it at Birmingham Rep, the major regional producing house
nearest to Powell’s constituency in neighbouring Wolverhampton.
Playwright Chris Hannan alternates in the first half between 1967-8 and
1992 (focusing on ’92 after the interval), when two opposing academics
collaborate towards a book on national identity. This concept is the
keystone of Hannan’s piece: the Sixties thread, too, shows not only
Powell’s public face but also the tensions with his oldest, Quaker,
friends, along with scenes from the radical Nineties scholar’s mother’s
Wolverhampton boarding-house and a neighbouring widow who claimed to be
the last white occupant in the street.
Director Roxana Silbert gives generous rein to her whole cast. Paula
Wilcox doubles strongly as the widow and the adoring but moralistic
distaff side of the Powells’ couple of friends, and Rebecca Scroggs is
impassioned but intellectually hectoring as historian Rose, building to
a climactic scene in which we yearn for her to best Powell in an
interview but know that she cannot. Powell was one of the most
prodigious minds of his generation, but allowed political career
frustration to seduce him to the dark side... you can’t help thinking
in such terms when he is played, marvellously, by Ian McDiarmid (with
only a couple of fleeting instances of
Star Wars Emperor-voice).
The conclusion is that, whether in terms of race, domicile, or in the
face of physical or mental deterioration, my identity is what I believe
it to be, because I say so. Powell’s flaw was to believe that he could
likewise declare upon who we collectively are. This was always going to
be problematic, as he attempted to speak for the common Englishman by
quoting Virgil. Hannan is canny in offering no doctrinaire answers but
asking the questions with impartial rigour, and Silbert and her cast –
praise is also due Bríd Brennan doubling as Powell’s wife and the
older, wiser historian – make a talky play compelling. Also, cheekily,
the interval music is “Get Back”.
Written for the Financial
Times.