Stop and Search

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. From award-winning writer Gabriel Gbadamosi comes a visceral and poetic new play, exploring a time of distrust where the lines blur between conversation and interrogation. Stop and Search explores our deep ambivalence about the ways we police each other. "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. The Arcola is an incubator of London's future culture: multicultural, far-seeing, cutting edge. I can only imagine developing such a departure from the old state of the nation play as we have with Stop and Search through the active engagement of the artistic team under Mehmet Ergen's direction." - Gabriel Gbadamosi