The Hounding Of David Oluwale

On 4 May 1969, the battered body of a 38-year-old Nigerian man was recovered from the River Aire in Leeds. David Oluwale was quite familiar to the officers who found him: he had been sleeping rough and had a sorry history of spells inside prison and psychiatric hospitals. Ominously, he was known among certain officers at Millgarth police station as their favourite “playmate”.
Two officers eventually served prison sentences for assault but escaped charges of causing Oluwale’s death. It remains the only case in which British policemen have been tried for killing a man of African descent, and it was brought back to the public’s attention in a book by Kester Aspden, which last year won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award for non-fiction.
You would be forgiven for assuming that such a swiftly produced stage version would be a straightforward verbatim account of the investigation. Yet Oladipo Agboluaje’s adaptation, commissioned by the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the black theatre coalition Eclipse, is a powerfully imagined, theatrically fluid reconstruction that enhances the official record to impressive dramatic effect.