Review: THE UNSEEN, Riverside Studios
Strong stuff as we bear witness to tyranny
Well, The Shawshank Redemption it certainly isn’t!
Craig Wright’s 2007 play, revived in an uncompromising production directed by Iya Patarkatsishvili, is three parts an insight into the incarcerated soul and one part a call to arms to ensure such prisoners are not left unseen. If Human Rights Theatre is a thing, this is Human Rights Theatre.
It’s clear that we’re in Putin’s Russia, but Simon Kenny’s set of greyest concrete and steel with flashing lights and alarms overhead, could be any one of the world’s many dungeons. It’s a place that is universal in place and time.
So too are its occupants. Two men, one older, one younger, separated by an empty cell, talking to each other, but not seeing each other, incarcerated on a flimsy pretext of harming a totalitarian state, those all-powerful yet thin-skinned constructs.
Wallace (Richard Harrington) is the old lag, 11 years in, a GP on the outside, an educated, erudite man. He has made his accommodations with his fate and his routines prove sufficient to get through the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years and, if not broken, he’s not fighting back any more. Valdez (Waj Ali) is younger, three years in and more fragile, emotional and scared, prone to hallucinations. Two decent man in the most indecent of circumstances.
Smash (Ross Tomlinson) is their guard/torturer and clearly demented, more damaged by the prison than they are, craving love, terrified of everything and everyone. We don’t know what he’s going to do because he doesn’t either.
The three actors make three credible men, but the script gives them little room to expand the types they are assigned to play. They are what they say they are - literally. It’s relentless too, a very talky 80 minutes, in which action and interaction is minimal - one wonders if three interlocking monologues might have served us better.
But everyone paying for a ticket will know what to expect, as this is theatre as agitprop not entertainment, albeit in furtherance of a cause growing more urgent every day. I wonder, though, if anyone in the audience will learn anything, most of those prepared to invest the time and money surely already well aware of such misery, such injustice?
Perhaps that is to misread the purpose of the play. The title suggests that our obligation is to bear witness, to see people others would prefer you didn’t - and for both parties to know that too.
The Unseen at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith until 14 December
Photo images: Manuel Harlan
All ticket proceeds will be donated to human rights organisations dedicated to supporting prisoners of conscience in Russia. Your participation directly contributes to their vital efforts in defending freedom and justice. (From https://theunseenplay.com/)
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