Review: SUN LINE at The Meyerhold Theatre Centre

Werner and Barbara are dressed in the same camely yellow-brown; it's the colour of cheap furniture, of the carpet that came with the place. It's forgettable. It's boring. And then the dialogue starts - and for eighty intense minutes, it doesn't stop; it gets louder, tenser, angrier. It gets violent. In Victor Ryzhakov's staging of the words of Ivan Vyrypaev, nothing goes unsaid.

The premise is simple. Tonight, all the things we keep to ourselves will come out. It's like a photographic negative of a regular play: the subtext is stated (sometimes, shouted) out loud as dialogue; the text is omitted. Snide remarks, shameful confessions - about sex, about kids, about your mother. It's like if Harold Pinter wrote The Twilight Zone. It's like if Samuel Beckett wrote The Odd Couple. It's like if someone drugged you and your wife and you woke up in a parallel world with sound effects and a table wrapped in camely yellow-brown paper, and you decided now is the time to talk about having a baby.

Barbara (Yulia Peresild) and Werner (Andrey Burkovsky) are a couple. The sex is okay. There are some problems. They're happy. They're unhappy. Months, or maybe years of action go by, and they talk about the things couples talk about, they think about going dancing, they get into a fight. The volume is at peak, the physical comedy is at peak. There's a lot of swearing. A tender moment. A lot more swearing.

Real violence, the sound of a hand on skin. The sound effect of a fist hitting a groin.

A lot of swearing.

Sun Line is unreal but recognizable, cathartic, exhausting, relaxing. We know Werner and Barbara, even if we don't know them, even if most of what they say is ridiculous. (Clever, but ridiculous.) (Pointed, clever, and ridiculous).

When they shout, our voices feel hoarse. It's that kind of play.

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