The Way review: The cast is a tremendous assembly of Welsh talent, but the show is a mess

TV and politics go together like chocolate souffle and a bag of broken glass. Which is to say that effective television is about subtlety, the drawing out of subconscious resonances, the tug on personal memory, while politics is the opposite: explicit, exterior, and exogenous. It’s this contrast that makes the BBC’s new three-part drama, The Way, about an uprising among Welsh steelworkers – such a risk. Will these delicate ingredients work together?

The Port Talbot steelworks: a crucible of industry and discontent. Two workers die in quick succession – the first in a workplace accident, the second in a grief-stricken public suicide – and the spark is lit for a combustible series of protests. At the heart of the drama is the Driscoll family: Geoff (Steffan Rhodri), the plant’s cautious union rep, his estranged wife Dee (Mali Harries), a firebrand in the heart of the dissent, and their kids, recovering addict Owen (Callum Scott Howells) and copper Thea (Sophie Melville). Rounding out the Driscoll cohort is the ghost of Geoff’s father, Denny, played by Michael Sheen, who co-created the series.

Locally, Denny is venerated as a hero for his role in industrial action of yore, but for Geoff the truth of his father is altogether more complicated. “I love all those poems and songs they’ve written about being rational and sensible,” Denny sneers at his boy. As the unrest grows on the streets of Port Talbot, and the Driscolls find themselves at the centre of an international manhunt, these questions of legacy, integrity and pragmatism collide.

“I can see where I am,” Owen announces, in the show’s opening voiceover. “I can see where I’ve been, but I can’t see where I’m going.” That is the path of The Way, to try to illuminate the future for hard industry in a world that is being reshaped by technological advancement and foreign investment (or under-investment). It is a vision of a country fraying at the seams. Scenes of protestors clashing with riot police on the high street of the Welsh town are manipulated using deepfake software to justify a hard crackdown. Internment camps spring up, the Welsh-English border is closed, and the army is mobilised. Civil war seems to loom for this sceptred isle, and suddenly the prejudices of a nation so reluctant to take asylum seekers are laid bare. What happens if we need to escape? If our families have to pay smugglers to hide them in cargo trucks? If we must trust a small boat to ferry us across the Channel?

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The Way is constructed as a “what if”, intended to expose our social reality. The drama is imbued with a sense of urgency, but one that is undermined by stuttering gear shifts. There is a creative tension between the desire to create a realistic alternative world (“what if the UK fell into social unrest and our citizens had to seek refuge on the continent?”) and an attempt to mythologise the situation with camp iconography, like an ominous Red Monk, an ancient sword, and the shadowy figure of The Welsh Catcher (Luke Evans). It is tempting to ascribe the depiction of social issues to Sheen – who has long been an activist for left-wing causes – and the visual lyricism to co-creator James Graham, whose drama Sherwood more successfully integrated elements of the Robin Hood story with modern malaise. What of the third wheel in the creative tricycle, cult documentarian Adam Curtis? Well, there’s some signal hijacking by archive footage of everything from ghostly factories to Kenneth Williams, and a trippy teddy bear who tells Owen to head “out of the woods and into tomorrow”.

If that doesn’t make it clear, I’ll spell it out: The Way is a mess. No element feels wholly cohesive, from the strife on the factory floor to the strange paternity drama within the Driscoll unit. The cast is a tremendous assembly of Welsh talent – and the sight of Steffan Rhodri wielding a sword and charging down the streets of Port Talbot, a welcome one – but the material is thinly spread over this three-part series. Everything happens with unjustifiable rapidity, from the fomentation of insurrection to the total lockdown of the Welsh nation. And while the concept of attempting to extract human sympathy for the migrant crisis, by reversing the roles, is an interesting one (not unlike what Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses achieved for a school-age understanding of structural racism), it’s also totally unsubtle. “What would Polish people think of all these Welsh immigrants taking all of their jobs?” Owen asks his girlfriend Anna (Maja Laskowska) as they head for Europe. “They’d think: fair play,” she tells him. This feels like the sort of dumbed-down distillation of a complex situation that Sheen, Graham and Curtis would usually eschew.

“I want things back the way they were.” This is the slogan that the protestors take up. But what does it mean? The end of a surveillance state, a more compassionate welfare system, the return of British manufacturing. If that sounds like an incoherently nostalgic manifesto, then that’s because it is. The show is just as confused as its mutineers. Aesthetically and ideologically undercooked, The Way feels like it has been rushed out of the oven for an election year, before the souffle has started to rise.

‘The Way’ is available on BBC iPlayer