Power of Sail at the Menier Chocolate Factory – Reviews Round-up

"Deliciously knotty morality thriller about a campus scandal at an American university"

"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."

"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."

"I don’t want to give the game away because the reveals are so enjoyable. But everyone has an angle, everyone has pressure points, everyone has a soul that’s a little grubby."

"I did want more nastiness and menace at the climax. But this is a well-judged, well-acted show."

"Brisk, well-made and punchy, it reminded me why a good off-West End drama is such an enjoyable night out."

"This 'Moral thriller' about a college race rumpus drifts off course"

"Verdict: Polished but puzzling"

"'The answer to hate speech, is more speech,' he glibly claims in Paul Grellong's David Mamet-ish drama spun from the tightening noose of a tawdry compromise. The problem is that Grellong's play goes on to suggest that a legitimate way to defeat white supremacists' 'distortion of truth and omission of facts' can be… the distortion of truth and omission of facts."

"Dominic Dromgoole's handsome production features oak panelling, swivelling on casters to create different college locations and shifting perspectives. But amidst the craftsmanship, the terrific Giles Terera, as a visiting professor, is reduced to adjudicating on the play's inconclusive ethical, social and racial disputes."

"An enjoyable and provoking cancel culture thriller"

"This talky and twisty show is brisk and punchy but tries to cram too much into the 100-minute running time"

"Paul Grellong’s talky, twisty American campus thriller about moral compromise and the limits of free speech gets a luxuriously cast and designed British premiere from Dominic Dromgoole here. It’s an enjoyable and provoking watch, though the number of issues Grellong crams into 100 minutes means it’s necessarily schematic."

"Almost every character divulges a shameful secret or hidden motivation, and what starts as a passionate intellectual argument spirals into death and disgrace."

"The Power of Sail belongs to the school of American writing where characters bat complex ideas back and forth in perfectly formed, snappy exchanges."

"Dromgoole’s direction is brisk and economic. Ovenden nicely captures the weakness beneath Nichols’s arrogance, though he feels young for the part... Terera and Benz share a terrifically tense, if improbably fast-escalating, confrontation. The angry head-to-head between Franks’s Principal Katz and Bernstein’s Maggie, who is also Jewish, is heavy handed."

"... after all the hectic debate the ending is surprisingly downbeat and sudden. But the issues Grellong raises aren’t going away, and you leave the auditorium with your head buzzing."

"Campus cancel culture drama ripe for a Netflix series"

"Paul Grellong’s gripping dialogue makes a brisk plot and unlikable characters immensely watchable as a Harvard professor invites a white supremacist for a debate"

"Paul Grellong’s intelligent if schematic play incorporates themes of cancel culture, Nazi legacies and the intersection between freedom of expression and hate speech."

"Some scenes rehearse their political positions openly. Where this might have felt expositional or static, it grips with its adrenalised dialogue. But this is coupled with a briskness in plot – one twist after another – that pushes it forward at a rate of knots, while almost all of the characters turn out to be appalling in ways that feel too flat. Still, jumps in time are managed with immense clarity both in script and the optics, under Dominic Dromgoole’s accomplished direction."

"The cast excels, too, especially Giles Terera, playing Nichols’ former protege, now star academic."

"A flawed but fascinating dive into the campus culture wars"

"A Harvard professor lands himself in deep water in Paul Grellong’s convoluted but intelligent look at a very modern phenomenon"

"... a timely look at freedom of speech and the perils of taking sides at university, smartly directed, as ever, by Dominic Dromgoole."

"If the character doesn’t fully live and breathe here, that’s less due to Ovenden’s performance – he’s plausibly high-IQ and catches Charles’s bullish struggle against the prevailing cultural wind – than the hampering structure, Grellong incrementally revealing who’s backstabbing whom via an about-turning time-scheme that takes a 24-hour round-trip."

"The evening excels, though, in suggesting how free-speech champions can ooze affronted entitlement – feeling primally dislodged by diversity drives. That’s crystalised in a witty and tense closing, albeit not fully climactic, bar-room exchange between Terera’s black academic success-story and the prematurely bitter white PhD student (Lucas Poole). There’s more to say on all this, but this still leaves ample to chew on."

"Generations clash in complex campus drama"

"Not content with setting up a fast-paced debate about the limits of academic freedom, the American playwright catches us off balance with a shifting chronological structure which, in the second half, continually asks us to reassess the motivations of his main characters."

"Dominic Dromgoole’s production uses projections of Twitter feeds, a slightly old hat technique, to stoke the sense of looming crisis. In the lead role, Julian Ovenden is convincingly acerbic as a man who can’t help reminding everyone that his family connections with Harvard go back a long way. It’s just a pity that Grellong tries to rush through many plot twists, some of them less than plausible."

"Dramatically unsatisfying"

"European premiere of Paul Grellong’s timely but tediously handled story of campus cancel culture"

"Timely, pleasingly twisty, but dramatically unsatisfying, Paul Grellong’s 2019 mystery grapples with cancel culture, the surging popularity of the far right and the unspoken moral compromises constantly required to function in a complex, pluralistic society."

"Dromgoole struggles to instil the slow-moving story with dynamism, allowing the energy to dip during one long, directionless debate after another."

"Heading the cast, Julian Ovenden brings a suitably ruffled energy to his depiction of embattled professor Charles, skilfully capturing his intellectual arrogance and wounded ego."

"Between scenes, Leo Flint’s busy video projections add to the sense of onstage clutter, covering the walls with overlapping screeds of glowing orange text. This scrambled scrawl of tweets, news headlines and quotations helps to underline the frightening momentum of online outrage that so often drowns out rational debate."