DESPITE its brutality, the true story of Nigerian immigrant David Oluwale’s maltreatment by two Leeds police officers is a researcher’s dream.

All the details carefully recorded by courts and social services, ready to be uncovered by the owner of a moral conscience looking for a tale to tell.

But this play’s strength is also its weakness.

What it gains from attention to the real life detail, it loses in its fiction.

The stark facts of Oluwale’s victimisation contrast too sharply with the scenes in between, so that in fleshing out the characters they appear to become more two-dimensional.

The drama does what real life cannot – bring Oluwale back from the dead to confront his fate. Conversations between the victim and DCS Perkins, of Scotland Yard internal affairs, form the framework of the plot and contain some of its most moving moments.

In reality Perkins was as meticulous an investigator as when reproduced on stage, his extensive research unveiling the tragic demise of the lively 19-year-old who arrived in the UK in the 1960s, full of hope and ambition.

Instead Oluwale was confined to a mental institution for eight years, where he received electric shock treatment and stepped back into the world a broken man.

Sleeping rough on the streets, he was hounded by officers seeking a human punch bag, until he was found drowned in the River Aire, aged just 38.

There is no gratuitous violence in the play, just enough to give a flavour of the suffering Oluwale experienced. And there’s them claiming they will take him to a ship sailing for his African home – a trick that seems even more brutal than the beatings.

If this drama had been pacier it would have been breathtakingly powerful, but instead, for the most part, it remained merely interesting.