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Hannah Lavery’s play about the death of a man in police custody in 2015 is both impassioned and poetic
‘It’s not Black Lives Matter,” says one of the characters in Hannah Lavery’s damning new play. “This is Scotland. It’s not the same.”
The police forcefully hold a young black man on the ground. Within 90 minutes, the father of two is dead. But this is not Minneapolis in 2020. Rather, this is Kirkcaldy in 2015 and the man is 31-year-old gas engineer Sheku Bayoh. Behaving erratically in the early hours of a May morning, Bayoh was held down by several officers. By the time they stood up he was unconscious.
