Laurence Fishburne's Riff Raff to stir up the Arcola in Dalston

The American actor Laurence Fishburne's debut play, Riff Raff, opens this week at east London's small but influential Arcola theatre. Fishburne, best known for his roles in The Matrix and CSI, wrote the play in 1994, setting the action in a crack den on New York's Lower East Side on Halloween. In 2000, he turned the play into a film, Once In a Life. But, according to the UK show's producer, Fishburne will disappointingly not be making the trip to Dalston to draw any useful comparisons between his play's setting and the Arcola's location – just off what the Daily Telegraph theatre critic Charles Spencer recently termed "a menacing main street, often patrolled by terrifying hooded youths".