#BlackLivesMatter: Remembering Mark Duggan and David Oluwale in Contemporary British Plays

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines two British plays that respond to cases in which the police have been implicated in the deaths of black men. Gillian Slovo’sThe Riots(Tricycle Theatre, 2011) uses interviews from witnesses and politicians to dissect the events leading up to and during the Tottenham riots that followed in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan by police on 4 August 2011 and spread to other inner cities in England over the following five nights. I examine how the first half portrays the local community’s concerns and locates the breakout of riots within a longer history of tense police-community relations in Tottenham, whereas the second half focuses on the political rhetoric surrounding the spread of rioting throughout England, which means that Mark Duggan disappears from the narrative. Oladipo Agboluaje’s adaptation of Kester Aspden’sThe Hounding of David Oluwale(Eclipse Theatre, 2009) effectively uses dramatic strategies to remember the life of 38-year old Nigerian David Oluwale whose body was retrieved from the River Aire in Leeds on 4 May 1969 after allegedly last seen being chased towards the river by two police officers two weeks earlier. I explore the effectiveness of both plays as memorializations of black lives and consider how they contribute to ongoing debates about the relationship between black men and the police in Britain. #BlackLivesMatter #BlackPlaysMatter