Split between the late 1960s and the present day in Wolverhampton, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's
Marriage Material, based on Sathnam Sanghera's 2013 novel, makes a connection between the politics of the two times that's hard to miss: In the first act, Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech is still fresh in everyone's memories, both the white racists who felt emboldened by it, and the immigrant communities who had to deal with the consequences. In the second act there's no single obvious instigator mentioned, but disenfranchised young white men are once again being encouraged to blame their problems on anyone with a different skin colour. These scenes are hard to miss, and they provide an important background to everything that happens to the central characters. What's impressive though is how this comes across without ever becoming what the story is really about.
