THE STORY Olivier, SE1

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE, OR HANG ON A MINUTE.. Everyone (especially journalists) loves a drama about newspapers. Hot-tempered rackety bantering , stories urgently chased, rivalries and righteousness, secrets and lies. In Tracey Scott Wilson’s 2003 play, now updated (though without including social-media in its plot) we are in a hot and troubled American city. A young white man, heir to a Wall St fortune but working altruistically as a teacher in a rough black areas, has been shot dead when driving in the neighbourhood at night with his pregnant wife, wanting to show his parents a hip Brazilian restaurant, to prove that its not all scary black thugs. In other words, a perfect focus for white outrage: a goodie. His wife reports in a stark opening police scene that it was a big man, black, who shot him… Projections and clips on Fleischl’s stark basketball-court set show that over weeks many black men have been arrested, roughly, with no conviction yet; the story rolls on, the wife harassed…