A new play by award-winning writer Gabriel Gbadamosi, a visceral and poetic, exploration of distrust: where the lines blur between conversation and interrogation.
Stop and Search explores deep ambivalence about the ways we police each other. A driver picks up a young man crossing Europe. Two police officers work a surveillance case. A passenger directs her taxi to the edge of a bridge. Three conversations grow increasingly uneasy.
Gabriel Gbadamosi is a poet and playwright. Stop and Search marks his London stage debut. His theatre credits include Eshu’s Faust (Jesus College, Cambridge), Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin), Shango (DNA, Amsterdam); and for radio, The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 – winner of the first Richard Imison Award. Gbadamosi’s novel Vauxhall won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair.
‘The play opens the question of why a tactic aimed at policing drugs, violence and terrorism (and that stops seven black people for every one white person) has grown into a flashpoint for wider, and deeper, flaws in a volatile and frightened social psyche.’ (Gbadamosi)
When: 9 January–9 February 2019 Where: 24 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL
