Dawn Walton on The Hounding of David Oluwale
January 27, 2009
“The way that I always describe it is as the ambitions of a young man versus the ambitions of a city. What happened, for me, is that the ambitions of the city overcame David’s, and indeed created an environment in which his demise - his slippery slope - became unstoppable,” says Dawn Walton. “There were several moments in David’s life when he could have been helped out, but he wasn’t helped, and that’s the point. Cities and countries make huge decisions that affect the way that people live, and David’s story is a good example of how communities can change in ways that destroy individuals. If we take things like Care in the Community, which was introduced by Enoch Powell - that’s how David ended up outside Menston Asylum. People who had had years and years of quite violent medical treatment - ECT etc - that had an effect on their behaviour afterwards were thrown out onto the streets helpless and unsupported. David was one of them.”
Walton, Eclipse Theatre’s artistic director, is explaining what she thinks ultimately caused the tragic series of events on which the company’s latest production, The Hounding of David Oluwale, is based. Oluwale’s decline, from being an ambitious young Nigerian immigrant attempting to assemble a new life in Leeds by beginning a career in engineering, in 1949, to an ostracised vagrant regularly attacked by two Leeds City Police officers, in 1969, is not easy to rationalise. Walton, however, has researched it carefully. As well as the book that Kester Aspden wrote in 2007, from which Eclipse’s script by Oladipo Agboluaje is adapted, she has consulted what sources she has been able to find. These included the Yorkshire Post’s coverage of the subsequent internal Police investigation, local people’s memories of Oluwale and the recollections of other people who immigrated to Britain in the period. She has also visited many of the places that Oluwale is known to have spent time in and around.
This research has enabled her to do considerable work with Agboluaje on his script. “My first job was to work with Oladipo in developing the play, so there wasn’t a script to start off with. We went into a workshop with six actors and worked very hard for three days to explore what the heart of the play would be and what form it would take,” she tells me.
However, although authenticity is one of the production’s integral aims, and Walton illustrates this by pointing out that “the order in which the major events in David’s life happened is maintained throughout”, it is the human tale that is paramount rather than stringent accuracy. Walton suggests that, hitherto, Oluwale’s downfall has been explored from a largely political and institutional standpoint that is a little slanted. “I would argue that the approach to David’s story previous to the theatrical production has been to focus on the issues around him that his life and death bring up. Our approach is to tell his story,” she reasons. “Since I took on this project, it’s been interesting how many people have sought Eclipse out because they want to talk to us about their stories. David Oluwale’s story is an important one because it has a beginning, a middle and an end. We know the circumstances and outcome of his death - there was a court case. What is really scary is that I’ve been made aware in researching this play that there are any number of cases since 1971 that have never made it to court and barely been reported.”
This is not the only sense in which Walton believes that the implications of Oluwale’s story stretch further than they might initially appear to. She intimates that to interpret its relevance too narrowly would be to miss the point. “David’s story has broad appeal,” she says. “It appeals to the people of Leeds, because it talks about landmarks that are familiar to them, and that are part of the city’s recent history. It has a national appeal, because Leeds in the ’60s was, for me, a microcosm of British society, in terms of the post-War years and the rebuilding that was going on in the country, with factories closing down and service industries taking over from manufacturing ones. I think it is the story of a community changing in which, as that community changes, everybody in that community is affected. I don’t think that his story is exclusive to any one community at all. A disenfranchised human being is a disenfranchised human being, and the mark of the community is how it responds to that.”
-Dawn Walton was talking to Simon Walker
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