Power of Sail
This 2019 drama about a Harvard professor who gets cancelled after he platforms a racist is never the play you think it’s going to be, and it’s all the better for it. Some LA critics were a little snooty about Paul Grellong’s play when it premiered there with Bryan Cranston starring. They’re wrong, it’s terrific. It has a genuinely exciting plot and a full-spectrum moral awareness of the murky motives and pitiless passions of identity politics; either of these qualities are a rare delight in new writing, and both together are an absolute treat. The weird and unmemorable title is the only piece of writerly fat in this lean and thrilling drama which peels the onion in six tense scenes, starting with a shocking and tragic event and then flipping back through the previous day’s events to reveal not so much whodunnit – because all are guilty – but when, how, and above all why. The professor who jump-starts the scandal, Charles Nichols, is not without good qualities: Julian Ovenden suffuses him with charm and kindness to leaven the flaws that will bring him down, mainly vanity and middle-aged white guy heebie-jeebies about his dwindling relevance. What’s horribly enjoyable and illuminating is the way the plot remorselessly strips the layers of camouflage off not just Charles but the four colleagues whose backstories, personal and cultural, are the long fuses to this moral conflagration. There’s Black TV star Baxter Forrest, played by the excellent Giles Terera, who conveys slick