This is Roy Williams’s second play this year about morally compromised cops. The first, Kingston 14, was set in Jamaica. Here, Williams returns to familiar ground in south London to explore the problems of an eager young policewoman. The result, while visceral and vigorous, suffers from its adherence to the currently fashionable 90-minute rule.
Williams starts with Sir Robert Peel reading out his nine basic principles for the Metropolitan police, which include reliance on public co-operation. Williams goes on to show how hard this is to achieve in the modern age. His protagonist, Gail Wilde, arrives in a bustling London borough from sedate Horsham and soon finds how difficult it is to play by the book. She’s assigned to a tough cop, Spence, who makes illegal payments to his regular grass, does his best to provoke a known wife-beater and beats up a young gang-rape suspect with what proves to be fatal consequences.
Williams records all this with detailed honesty and never makes light of the problems faced by the police. We learn of the insults they have to face (“Are you one of the Village People?”), of the difficulty of getting victims of domestic abuse to indict their husbands and of the inevitable demands on their own domestic lives: the fact that we see all this through the perspective of a female cop gives the play its freshness. But the play’s brevity means that there is something hard to believe about the speed with which the bright-eyed Gail succumbs to the prevailing ethos of bending the rules to get results. In the later stages, Gail does a dodgy deal with Spence’s truculent informant but it was never clear to me whether she was driven by guilt, naivety or a misguided pragmatism.
Even if Gail’s descent is over-rapid, Lorraine Stanley gives a superb performance and shows how a female cop has to cope not just with abuse and violence on the streets, but also with sexism inside the force. Ricky Champ as the impulsive Spence, Sharlene Whyte as his embittered wife and Fraser James as a beleaguered sergeant lend impressive support, and Maria Aberg’s direction and Naomi Dawson’s design are strong on atmosphere: scene merges into scene in a way that suggests there is sometimes little division between the law enforcers and the law breakers.
It is all a big departure from Peel’s vision of a world where physical force is used only when “persuasion, advice and warning” are found wanting, but a longer play would have made Williams’s point about the moral dilemmas faced by the modern cop even more believable.
• Until 29 November. Box office: 020 7722 9301. Venue: Hampstead, London.
• This article was amended on 20 November 2014 to add Noof Ousellam’s name to the picture caption.
