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The Way on BBC One review: Michael Sheen's directing debut ruins a good idea with cliché and stereotype

I deeply regret agreeing to review The Way, the BBC’s new three-part drama about a civil uprising in Port Talbot . It’s directed by Michael Sheen and everyone loves Michael Sheen, right? And the actors are all really good, too. Unfortunately, The Way is preachy and artless.

The story follows members of the Driscoll family from Port Talbot in South Wales who lead a revolt following a strike over the future of the steel works. From this initial crisis the family become fugitives in a Britain that appears to have turned into a police state overnight.

The character CJ from the sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin once said, “I avoid clichés like the plague” – well The Way is drawn to clichés like a moth to a flame. With only three hours to play with, the level of gratuitous referentiality is almost overwhelming. We get the symbols of political struggle rammed home within seconds: a demonic Margaret Thatcher mask; the Miners’ Strike, historic Welsh resistance; the scourges of privatisation and surveillance culture (a lot of the footage is “seen” through CCTV).

Next comes the cultural mythos: the fire of the Dragon; a literal and totemic sword in the steel works museum; the “red monk”, whose costume is a rather poor stand-in for the Guy Fawkes mask from V For Vendetta.

The cut-out characters never stop coming: the cowardly Westminster MP; the police officer torn between two worlds; the Polish migrant whose only purpose is to remind us how fragile life is; the Chinese factory owner who doesn’t care about the history of what he has taken on. There’s an utter shit of an English country gent who lives just across the border and says things like “Welshies” and “vermin”.

The way England and the English are portrayed in The Way makes crossing into Herefordshire seem like entering the Black Gate of Mordor. The final episode features an English middle-class dinner party, at which the full arrogance and anti-Welsh frippery of the hated colonialists is exposed over jokes about leek rationing. There is also a strongly implied contrast between English moral corruption and the salt-of-the-earth decency of the Welsh family.

Equally laboured is an attempt to imbue the story with magical realism. There’s a talking Teddy Bear in the woods who tries to distract troubled son Owen Driscoll from his destiny. Owen’s recurring sense of “drowning” is expressed by the visual metaphor of being underwater. The father figure, Geoff, is in regular conversation with his own dead father Denny, played by Sheen like The Lion King’s Mufasa to Geoff’s Simba, only in a bomber jacket. Then there are some Wizard of Oz allusions.

Within minutes we meet Simon the soothsayer/druid guy walking almost naked under the flyover. One irrefutable red flag is when a script uses lines from WB Yeats’ poem The Second Coming to convey apocalyptic seriousness. And you guessed it, the first words out of the soothsayer’s mouth are “Twenty centuries of stony sleep”. It’s not like there aren’t any good Welsh poets to choose from.

If this all seems rather poorly thought out, just wait until you see The Welsh Catcher and his Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cage full of poor Welsh kids – a villain played by Luke Evans who looks as if he’s just been kicked off the set of The Expendables.

No doubt it was considered challenging to juxtapose the story’s ancient mythic aspirations with a bleak techno soundtrack, from which the viewer only ever gets a few seconds’ respite. It is used relentlessly over riots and car chases as well as quieter moments, which feels like being subjected to a three-hour long Aphex Twin video.

Honestly, I feel terrible for writing this, especially when Steffan Rhodri and Mali Harries are particularly convincing and bring nuance and depth to an otherwise bizarre viewing experience. The great shame of The Way is that the subject it attempts to tackle is an undeniably fascinating one, and had it been handled with the deftness and scope it deserved, the examination of an uprising inspired by years of social and economic neglect could have been profoundly shocking and engaging.

An exploration of the reality and psychology of refugees should have been an equally rich theme. What we have instead is not only an over-earnest mess, but a rushed one, too. The characters have no time to grow naturally, which contributes to the concertina effect of forced exposition, unrealistic dialogue (written by the usually excellent James Graham) and the crashing of blatant symbolism.

“Am I dreaming?” asks Owen.

“You mean a nightmare,” comes the reply.

Not only did this idea have huge promise, but it could barely have been more timely, with the winding down of the real steel works in Port Talbot and the controversy over its future set against the debate over green energy. These two strands are ripe for a drama rich with the subtleties of history, politics and dystopian satire. Sadly, The Way isn’t it.

The Way is available in full on iPlayer and episode is on BBC One on Monday 19 February at 9pm

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The refugees sit huddled on a small inflatable dinghy, buffeted by the waves of the English Channel. White, working class and Welsh, they have no home, nor hope, left in Britain.

This inversion of the migrant narrative plays out in The Way, a thought-provoking new three-part BBC series born of a collaboration between actor Michael Sheen (directing), dramatist James Graham (writing) and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis (executive producing). An exploration of state, society and selfhood, it is a work of evident ambition but uneven execution that never quite coheres or even settles on a genre.

We begin with a slice of social-realism in Port Talbot, Wales, a once-prominent steelworks town where the people and industry have been left to slowly rust. But when a tragedy symptomatic of decades of neglect occurs, anger shakes the community from its malaise, inspiring first anomie, then anarchy. Within days, what starts as a local cause grows into a viral movement seized upon by disaffected masses who descend on the Welsh coast. They are swiftly followed by the army, which implements a total lockdown of Wales.

Caught in the middle of the carnage are the Driscolls, a family united only in their disappointment in one another. The father, Geoff (Steffan Rhodri), is a factory worker who calls for pragmatism and is branded a coward — not least by his firebrand estranged wife Dee (Mali Harries) and son Owen (Callum Scott Howells), a twentysomething numbed by drugs and despair. Searching for meaning in the melee, Owen ends up in serious danger. On the other side of the barricades, his police officer sister Thea (Sophie Melville) witnesses disturbing acts of “law enforcement” that prompt her to lead her family in an escape from the town.

The first episode, which builds up to the riots, is by far the strongest and the one in which the unmistakable hand of Curtis is most keenly felt. Both aesthetically in how it combines ghostly archival footage, abrupt cuts and absurd visual jokes to terrific effect, and thematically, in its scrutiny of ideology, authority and how random moments can alter epochs. By contrast, the next two chapters are tonally inconsistent and narratively unfocused. Following the Driscolls’ trek across “an island that’s gone mad”, these episodes jump erratically from contemporary issues to semi-mythic allegory; survival adventure to domestic drama; winking whimsy to po-faced soul-searching.

Clearly, the Driscolls’ journey is a figurative as well as a literal one, as they attempt to unburden themselves of individual and collective traumas during their odyssey. But neither the story of a family’s struggle to come together nor the tale of a nation falling apart is as sharp as you’d expect from the trio of talents behind the series.

The depiction of Britain’s almost overnight slide into an authoritarian, Welsh-persecuting dystopia seems especially rushed and thinly sketched. Scenes showing internment camps, vigilantes on borders, caged children and tech corruption are clearly designed to provoke, but lack sufficient context and detail to say something specific and significant about either today’s or tomorrow’s Britain. As it is, the events depicted often seem arbitrary. Perhaps that’s the point — a warning of how easily a seemingly free and tolerant society can lose its way.

BBC1, tonight at 9pm, then weekly. All three episodes on BBC iPlayer now

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