TV Pick of the Week: The Way - review by Yvette Huddleston

It helps that Sheen has partnered with the always dependably excellent screenwriter and playwright James Graham and with radical documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. The combination of those three talents was bound to create something remarkable. Set in Sheen’s Welsh home town of Port Talbot, it revolves around a strike at the local steelworks sparked by the death of a young worker who fell into a vat of molten slag at the plant and his father’s subsequent public suicide by self-immolation.

The storyline focusses on one family – the Driscolls. Father Geoff (Steffan Rhodri) works as liaison officer between workers and management and runs the steelworks’ museum. He has never quite lived up to the memory of his late father (a potent cameo from Sheen) who is something of a local hero. Back in the 1980s he was a committed union activist and striker, who never got over the failure of the strike, which the family blame for his early death. Geoff is separated from his firebrand wife Dee (Mali Harries) and are parents to troubled son Owen (Callum Scott Howells), a former drug addict and dealer, who is still struggling with addiction and mental health issues, and his capable older sister Thea (Sophie Melville), a police officer.

The narrative unfolds over three hour-long episodes and follows the Driscolls who, after a period of civil unrest, in which Owen is a significant participant, are forced to go on the run, trying to make it to the border and cross into England, avoiding the roadblocks and a sinister former mercenary known as ‘the Welsh-catcher’. The Driscolls are outraged that they have effectively become refugees. “It happens all the time, all over the world,” observes Owen’s Polish girlfriend Anna (Maja Kaskowska), a young woman whose own personal experiences have made her wise beyond her years.

There is plenty of energy in the storytelling, the action moves along at pace yet Sheen also manages to incorporate moments of reflection that are almost lyrical and dream-like in tone. Interwoven throughout are resonant sections of archive footage as well as jump-cut CCTV clips (surely courtesy of Curtis), overlayed with dissonant music which could have been potentially jarring but actually fit seamlessly into the whole. Unmissable television.