What Shadows

Unwrapping the Rivers Of Blood speech once and for all

Premiering at The Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2016, this timely and politically explosive play by highlights the need for measured discourse in a world dominated by fear-mongering and hateful rhetoric. Using the infamous Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell as a jump-off point, we follow the effects it had years later, through the eyes of a mixed-race woman in Britain, an Oxford academic and daughter of a Caribbean immigrant, who found that the polarizing speech shattered her childhood. And now she wants answers from the man himself
With Ian McDiarmid (Star Wars) playing the bombastic politician, we journey with Rose as she sets out to demand answers from the man who equated immigration with "preventable evils". Along the way we discover why she is so invested in finding peace through meeting him, and whether or not she can lay to rest, the ghosts of her childhood.