Tel is driving through France; he picks up Akim, a young man from an undisclosed African nation hitching a lift to the UK. The first half hour of Gabriel Gbadamosi’s grimly gritty play is mostly Tel shouting: a middle-aged white London geezer doing dodgy import deals, he is full of rage, drug-fuelled paranoia and prejudice against bloody foreigners, coming over here, taking his house, etc. He’s only picked Akim up because he thinks talking will keep him awake at the wheel; when not outright insulting his passenger Tel mostly barks about needing to get back to his girlfriend, who he’s convinced is cheating on him.
But Gbadamosi’s writing lacks nuance, and Tel remains one-dimensional. Although Shaun Mason physically embodies the character’s strain and aggro well, his voice is relentlessly one-note. Munashe Chirisa is beautifully calm and gentle as Akim – and a little slippery, the character spouting gnomic phrases and telling stories that may or may not be true. He’s got a passport that probably isn’t his; to start a new life, he’s willing to embrace a new identity.
Then ‘Stop and Search’ suddenly introduces a load more characters and lurches into a drama of bent cops, double-crossings and romantic betrayals. But if the plotting – police stake-out, desperate lover – is often overheated, the play remains undercooked.
There are parallels to be drawn between Tel and the police sergeant, called Tone, who’s determined to take him out. Both hide their fear behind strutting machismo, both have a desire to control women, both have the conviction that they’ve been forced to take the law into their own hands. Odder, however, are the surely intentional echoes between Akim and Tone’s colleague Sergeant Lee, a black trans man: because both Lee and Akim are trying to forge a new identity? Bit of a reach.
And Akim never really rejoins the action in a satisfying way. Is he simply a device, used again in the very final minutes to prove that our tough-nut racist Tel wasn’t such a bad guy after all? Who knows. There’s a degree of intrigue in Gbadamosi’s script, but it never delivers in Mehmet Ergen’s rather hard-going production.