Wildefire, as you would expect from a playwright as accomplished as Roy Williams, is sparkily written and takes an unexpectedly sympathetic look at the Metropolitan police force. It explores the stresses that link law with disorder. It offers no apology for corruption but attempts to understand it. Above all, it looks at provocation, at what incites violence.
A team of south London coppers is led by Lee, smoothly played by Eric Kofi Abrefa, with back-up from Simon Manyonda’s clownish Chris. But the play is given its power by its central performance from the superb Lorraine Stanley as PC Gail Wilde. She starts off as a cheeky, chirpy new girl, hoping to do right. By the end she has every reason to feel cynical, frustrated and crushed, especially after a violent attack on her and her colleague Spence (played with convincing facetiousness by Ricky Champ). Her unravelling is shocking to behold.
Naomi Dawson’s almost non-existent set is suitably stark, dominated by graffiti and with riot shields as prominent props. Maria Aberg’s direction is proficient, although the echoing acoustic made the play hard to hear in patches. But there are problems with this piece: once you get the idea that Gail Wilde is on a downward spiral, what follows feels predictable (although an already commissioned second play could ultimately change that). Still more detrimentally, it’s impossible to shake off the sense that one is somehow in Roy Williams’s classroom, being taught a lesson.
Wildefire is at Hampstead theatre, London NW3 until 29 November
More Stage reviews
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Queen Coal review – ruptured relationships in a former mining community
Royal Ballet triple bill – a purely surface rendering of Auden’s Age of Anxiety
The Shape of the Table review – David Edgar’s power play proves prophetic
Stewart Lee review – tricksy gags about liberals, rightwingers and ‘the Islams’
