Law and Order in Roy Williams' Fallout

The Depiction of the Metropolitan Police Service as a Consequence of the Macpherson Report

Seminar Paper , 2012 , 16 Pages , Grade: 2

Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies

Roy Williams’ play Fallout was written in 2003 and adapted for screen in 2008, contextualising knife crime amongst black youngsters in Great Britain. This play is especially based on the Damilola Taylor Case of 2000. Williams himself states that homicides amongst teenagers are “about greed – wanting a mobile phone or a pair of trainers and just taking them. Everything is done so quickly, without thought for the consequences." (qtd. in Mason, Telegraph.co.uk). Therefore, this “incendiary play” (Osborne 499) shows the fallout of a murder, its motives as well as the fight between two separate worlds, namely “a street society and a polite society” and the clash they provoke (Sierz 186). Further, it depicts the confrontation between the “predominantly white authority structure, as represented in the play by the Met and a predominantly black subculture of young people whose exclusion from mainstream society they experience as part hardship and part badge of pride” (Derbyshire 420). Thus, the play focuses on two worlds which co-exist, showing failures in society and the police system by revealing the “tension between those in power and those condemned to subordinate positions and second-class lives” (qtd. in Derbyshire 432).
This paper will mainly focus on the dominance of the Metropolitan Police Service (henceforth Met) in the play Fallout. Based on real events, such as the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and the Damilola Taylor Case, the play is a “state of the nation play that explores some of the key issues that concern [everyone] living in twenty-first century Britain” (Royal Court Theatre 5). The paper will, therefore, provide a brief overview on both the murder cases and the role of the Met therein. In addition, the problematic issues concerning race within the system revealed by the Macpherson report in 1999 will also be discussed. The second part of the paper will deal with the depiction thereof in Roy Williams’ play Fallout through the analysis of the similarities between reality and the fictive plot as well as through answering the question in how far the depiction is influenced by current controversies in the Met. Furthermore, it will analyse the similarities and diversities of the characters Joe and Matt, two police officers, as personifications of political correctness within the Law and Order system.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Background Information
2.1. Two Cases of Murder: Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor
2.2. The Macpherson Report

3. Fallout as a Reaction on Current Debates on Law and Order
3.1. Reality versus Fiction
3.2. Matt versus Joe

4. Conclusion

5. Works Cited 14

• College: University of Innsbruck (Department of English)
• Course: English Literature and Culture: Contemporary Black and South Asian British Drama
• Grade: 2
• Author: Anna Rauch (Author)
• Publication Year: 2012
• Pages: 16
• Catalog Number: V272961
• ISBN (eBook): 9783656652922
• ISBN (Book): 9783656652960
• Language: English
• Tags: order, williams, fallout, depiction, metropolitan, police, service, consequence, macpherson, report