The Way, review: Michael Sheen's Welsh dystopian thriller would be better titled The Mess
The Way is a boring title for a drama, and The Way (BBC One/iPlayer) is many things but never boring. It’s weird, indulgent, occasionally stirring, frequently pretentious. It aims to be different but mostly misses. The Mess would be a better title. The show’s creators – Michael Sheen, James Graham and Adam Curtis – have dispensed with the idea of drama as entertainment and decided instead to give us… well, what exactly?
On paper it’s a straightforward dystopian thriller with political undertones. When the Port Talbot steelworks is threatened with closure, workers vote to strike. Civil unrest spreads, the government launches an authoritarian crackdown and the Welsh border is shut. Anyone who wants to cross into England becomes a refugee, escaping either on foot or in the back of a lorry, and getting any further away than that requires a perilous journey to France in a small boat. See what they did there?
This frightening state of affairs is viewed through the eyes of one family: dad Geoff (Steffan Rhodri, best known as Dave Coaches in Gavin & Stacey), troubled son Owen (Callum Scott Howells), police officer daughter Thea (Sophie Melville) and estranged wife Dee (Mali Harries). The family has its own problems – Geoff is viewed as a distant dad and all-round disappointment, Owen is on antidepressants, and Thea once tasered her brother over a drugs deal.
That’s the substance, but The Way is preoccupied with the style. Cult documentary-maker Curtis is listed as a co-creator but doesn’t seem to have a specific brief – he doesn’t write, like Graham, or direct, like Sheen. He just lends an Adam Curtis vibe to the proceedings. That means his signature woozy, mildly unnerving video images are chucked in: flashes of 1980s miners’ strike footage; scenes that look as if they were shot on Cinefilm or CCTV; the camera disappearing into the mouth of one of those children’s playground bins shaped like a penguin.
You can either make a visually interesting piece like that, or you can ask your audience to become emotionally involved with your story, but you can’t have both. It just doesn’t work, because one takes away from the other. There are two fine performances here, from Howells and Rhodri, but they’re fighting to get past everything else.
Graham is heavy-handed with the refugee idea. “How ridiculous, us fleeing from our house on foot, no possessions,” one character says, to which a foreigner replies: “It happens. All the time. All over the world.” This conveys the message in one neat exchange, but Graham returns to it again and again. Over the border, middle-class Englishmen complain about “disease-riddled Welshies” who will “come flooding over here”. “They’ve always been a little bit different, culturally,” one sniffs.
Sheen, who has a cameo role as well as directing, is a proud Welshman who lives near Port Talbot (pronounced ‘P’Talbot’, I now know), and he pours in references to Welsh identity and myth. Perhaps his closeness to the subject matter muddied his thinking, because he should have taken a firmer hand with the script. Some storylines get too little time, others too much – a scene in which family members yell at one another in a forest for what feels like forever almost had me switching off. Episode three opens with some partner-swapping which, while amusing, bears zero relation to the plot. Is it a failure or a noble failure? I’m still not sure.
All episodes of The Way are available now on BBC iPlayer