The Hounding Of David Oluwale
May 1969 and the body of David Oluwale is pulled from a river. Eighteen months later, the investigation into his death will rip apart the police force, exposing the dark side of the shiny, new city in which he died.
An optimistic, ambitious immigrant from Nigeria, David Oluwale was a showman who loved to dance, but who became the destitute victim of police brutality.
Oladipo Agboluaje’s sensitive adaptation picks through the many accounts of Oluwale to reveal a chilling and resonant story of persecution and prejudice.
Adapted from Kester Aspden’s critically acclaimed book, this timely, gripping play unravels the mystery of Oluwale’s life and violent death.
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Play description
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.
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