What Shadows

Chris Hannan

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780018362
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

 'I was a storm. I was also a man entirely alone in a storm. There were forces beyond my control and I was one of them.' 

1968. Midlands MP Enoch Powell has something to say. Something he feels needs to be said. Something that could divide Britain forever.

1992. Rose Cruickshank, a black Oxford academic, wants answers. Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech, with its controversial words about immigration, shattered her childhood and now she is driven to confront both the man who made the speech and her own troubled identity. Will a meeting with Enoch resolve the conflicts that are tearing her – and the country – apart?

 Chris Hannan's powerful play,  What Shadows, is a searing look at identity and immigration within a bitterly divided country. It premiered at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2016, in a production directed by Roxana Silbert and starring Ian McDiarmid as Enoch Powell. The play was revived at the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh in 2017, before transferring to Park Theatre, London. 

ACT ONE

Scene One

The Ends of the Earth

Kintyre, December 1992.

The shore.

ROSE CRUICKSHANK enters. She’s black, thirty-five.

SOFIA NICOL enters in oilskins, carrying pots and creels ashore. She’s white, forty-eight. This is her piece of shore.

ROSE. How to talk to people we hate. How to speak across the anger that divides us. You and me. England. Half the country thinks the other half is mad. Nothing to bind us together but the fact we hate each other’s guts.

SOFIA. How did you find me?

ROSE. Got here at dawn. There were deer on the beach.

SOFIA. They come to lick the salt.

ROSE. So far from reality.

SOFIA. We have guns. We shoot. The children.

ROSE. You shoot the children?

SOFIA carries on with her work.

SOFIA. The children shoot the deer.

ROSE. I’m teaching at Oxford now. Your old college.

SOFIA. So remote.

ROSE. The pressure to publish. My next book’s about identity.

SOFIA. What’s it called?

ROSE. Who Can Tell Me Who I Am?

SOFIA. Who can tell you who you are?

ROSE. Who Can Tell Me Who I Am?

SOFIA. Is there an answer?

ROSE. Nobody can tell me.

SOFIA. Then why are you asking? Why are you here?

ROSE. I’ve come to make peace.

SOFIA. I have peace. I own fourteen acres and the shoreline.

ROSE. Fourteen acres of desolation. What do you do to enjoy yourselves?

SOFIA. We throw a great funeral.

ROSE. You in oilskins. People used to say you were the cleverest woman in England. I can rehabilitate you. You’re intellectually unfashionable, I’m black. We could write the book together. Who Can Tell Us Who We Are? England is a conflict. We could articulate the opposing views.

SOFIA needs time to take this offer in.

SOFIA. I read your first book.

ROSE. Thank you yes thank you.

SOFIA. Haven’t said anything nice about it yet.

Magisterial work of scholarship. Winning the Deutscher Prize, that puts Rose Cruickshank up there with some very big names.

ROSE. When I sent the first draft to my publisher it had the snappy title An Economic History of Immigrants to England: 1066 to the Present Day. Seven hundred and eighty-nine pages. The publisher said, Rose, in a bookshop why would I pick this up? I’m not going to publish unless you can tell me what it’s about, in four words. And I said SOFIA. Whose Idea Was England?

ROSE. Who created the Norman churches, the Norfolk fens, the East End

SOFIA. Oxford

ROSE. the things that made England England. Sailcloth, the canvas for her ships

SOFIA. the technology of the cotton manufacturers who came from medieval with their what did the locals call the Flemish workers?

ROSE. the blue nails. Unforgettable detail.

SOFIA. I was spat on. That’s an unforgettable detail.

ROSE. I wasn’t involved in that.

SOFIA. You got me sacked.

ROSE. You justified racism.

SOFIA. You led the students, made speeches. Colleagues turned their backs on me, the broadsheets tore me to pieces. The things people said and did. It was primitive, I was cast out. I put my girls in the car and took off. Roof piled with stuff, left Oxford like refugees, headed for the wilds of Scotland.

ROSE. Did you forget?

SOFIA. Forget?

ROSE. Forget Oxford.

SOFIA. The sea’s rich. I almost drowned once. You lose yourself.

ROSE. How did you learn?

SOFIA. You go out on other people’s boats. There’s money in it.

ROSE. Are you on your own now?

SOFIA. My lobster ends up in France.

ROSE. A book by Rose Cruickshank and Sofia Nicol. It’ll attract attention. We can begin with Enoch Powell. His racist speech about immigrants.

Do you still have sympathies for him?

SOFIA (she is tired of saying this). I suggested he had a portion of the truth.

ROSE. You defended the speech.

SOFIA. I said it has never been answered.

ROSE. To describe black children he used the phrase wide-grinning picaninnies. Should people who use racist language even be included in the conversation?

SOFIA. Is that your decision? Who to include in the conversation and who not?

ROSE. It’s almost untouchable.

SOFIA. Like me?

She’s the one living in the back of beyond.

ROSE. I’m here to listen.

SOFIA. Misunderstood before I open my mouth.

ROSE. You were trying to redefine racism, you said. Isn’t the definition pretty clear?

SOFIA. Black rioters burn down Asian shops. Are they racist? Nigerian English boys call Jamaican English boys slaves. Are they racist? And immigrants are often racist, they have to be to hold their communities together. They say we’re not like them, we don’t eat like them, we don’t think like them. We’re a little different, a little better. That’s what having an identity is, thinking you’re a little different, a little better. You don’t mix with people of other identities, in marriage say. And often there’s an enemy that defines you. Catholics and Protestants in Northern I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Production
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• Characters
• Act One
• Act Two
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information