The World Premiere of STOP AND SEARCH Comes to Arcola Theatre

Arcola Theatre in association with Maya Ellis today announce the world première of Stop and Search, by Gabriel Gbadamosi. Artistic Director of Arcola Theatre, Mehmet Ergen directs the production which opens on 14 January, with previews from 9 January and runs until 9 February.

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.

Gbadamosi said today, "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 director, Mehmet Ergen."

Gabriel Gbadamosi is an Irish-Nigerian 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.

Artistic Director of Arcola Theatre Mehmet Ergen is an award-winning director. His theatre credits for the company include Richard III, Bliss, The Cherry Orchard, Drones, Baby, Drones, An Enemy of the People, The Cradle Will Rock, Clarion, Shrapnel: 34 Fragments of a Massacre, Don Gil of the Green Breeches, Mare Rider, Sweet Smell of Success, The Painter, Macbeth, Fool for Love, Betrayal, Ashes to Ashes, Water's Edge, Dumb Show, Lost in the Stars, In The Jungle of the Cities and Piano. Other theatre credits include; King Lear (Southwark Playhouse). Ergen is also Artistic Director and founder of Arcola Istanbul and was previously Artistic Director of Southwark Playhouse, which he co-founded in 1993.