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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Arifa Akbar

Power of Sail review – campus cancel culture drama ripe for a Netflix series

Julian Ovenden and Tanya Franks in Power of Sail.
Free speech v hate speech … Julian Ovenden and Tanya Franks in Power of Sail. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

‘I’m one of the good guys,” insists a beleaguered Harvard professor facing student protests after inviting a white supremacist to be part of a university debate on extremism. The defence, for Charles Nichols (Julian Ovenden), is that illogical or offensive arguments need to be heard in order to be dismantled, though hand-wringing principal Amy Katz (Tanya Franks) suggests he is doing this as an attention-grabbing career move.

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

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