Riverside Studios Imprisons Us Within its Brutally Compelling “The Unseen” – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The London Theatre Review: The Unseen

By Ross

One man rocks, seated in a square on a hard bench beside an empty bowl and a bucket. The other is motionless, face down on the other side of this cold grey set, passed out in his own confined square not moving. When a red light flashes distinctly and sharply aligned with a piercing siren, the scream seems to wake the one, bringing him to some sort of life, only to ponder and stare off into space. These two men are The Unseen, a well-formulated and sharply defined piece of writing by playwright Craig Wright (The Pavilion; “Six Feet Under“) that is determined to swoop down and cut itself deep into our thoughts and shake up our passive sensibilities in a quick transition from stillness to the extreme.

“I went to the seaside,” the man begins, starting a wordplay game to fill the void and to distract the mind. It takes a few beats and tries for the game to make sense, but as we are told, there is “no shame in accepting help.” We lean it to the formulation, attempting to put time and place into the space, like the man, Wallace, portrayed with great attention to detail and nuance by Richard Harrington (West End’s Home, I’m Darling), does with his cutlery and bowls. He is keeping time, yet he has lost his way through it, as pointed out by the other, Valdez, tenderly embodied by Waj Ali (Gate’s Dear Elizabeth). “It’s been two hours,” he tells the surprised Wallace, but it’s hard for the two to actually know for certain, as they have been held captive, in what appears to be a Russian prison for political activism, separated by walls, unseen by the other, and left to only think about what torturous action will be done against them when they are hauled off again by the guard named Smash, powerfully played by an impressive Ross Tomlinson (“This is Going to Hurt“).

Directed with political intent by Iya Patarkatsishvili, a dedicated political activist who advocates for human rights, with a particular focus on political prisoners in Russia, The Unseen plays its clever verbal alphabet game with clarity and compassion, drawing us into the world of these two almost effortlessly, by creating a space that we have to lean into. The game is symbolic of so much and so many things, but mainly, in the simplest of framings, it is a way for the men to hold on to their sanity and to pass through a forever amount of endless time. The men communicate, boldly and with great care, through the walls that stand between them, making jokes and taking their time to talk about all that they endure at the violent hands of, the appropriately named, Smash. It draws us into their plight and pain, as they navigate survival tactics that are laced with fear and a feeling of resignation. Until Valdez breaks the code, shifting into a secret tapping that has led him to believe there is a way to escape, and in a disillusioned instant, the imprisonment these two have been involved in has shifted, but not in the same way for both of them.

Wallace is at first intrigued, as we all are, but the framing of the space in between them grows wide and more difficult to believe in. Valdez might be cracking under the harsh conditions of their confinement, and as delivered strongly, most compassionately, and with intense focus by the two compelling actors, a fantastically whole universe grows in between them, playing with ideas of regime and resistance, that together have created this prison that grew, like trees and roots around them. There is a passage to hope, Valdez tells the increasingly skeptical Wallace, delivered like Morse code through the walls, and all that Valdez wants to know is whether Wallace is going to help or not.

However, the framing of sanity and imprisonment doesn’t stop there in Wright’s fascinatingly dense play. It only resonates more loudly when the loud and fierce prison guard starts engaging verbally, sharing with his two victims, the deepening chasm that is growing inside him between duty and disgust. The trust and duality of the space, designed with clever harsh intent by designer Simon Kenny (West End/Off-Broadway’s Sweeney Todd), made only the more jarring by the lighting design of Anna Watson (Donmar’s The Band’s Visit) joined with the jolting sound design of Mike Walker (Fortune’s Operation Mincemeat). It strikes hard at our senses and our own resistance, drawing us into the door opening and making us shiver in its coldness and dangerous contemplations. “Go, fuck-face,” they are told. “Bloody go!,” but the freezing of their framing means something far greater than the hope and fantasy that came before it. They have now become prisoners of their own empathy and mistrust, and the walls close in around them all.

Wright says that for a character to be authentic, they have to be kept quite completely from leaving the space, and therefore, the play by a realistic and overwhelming force, and in the recently reviewed The Blood Quilt, that force was a symbolic, yet authentic storm that kept the sisters locked in together in the house, hashing out past trauma and conflict. In Wright’s The Unseen, he has taken that construct quite literally, for the majority of the play, placing two human beings inside a mysteriously violent prison, infusing them with differing opinions about an empty space between them.

The character of Smash, dynamically played by Tomlinson is the demented flame that takes this formula and elevates it, mainly because the damage his soul is consumed by, fueled by a need for love, is more terrifying because we don’t know what it will bring. Hope has been brought into their incarceration, but also fear and mistrust, which, as it turns out, are a bigger barrier to freedom in ways far stronger than just walls and bars. The Unseen is a powerfully ambitious piece of writing, that taps into power play structuring and the dangerous world of mistrust and disgust. It surges forward, even when it sometimes stalls in a never-ending game of words. Yet, it engagingly and successfully implores us to investigate the way humanity can erase a soul through isolation, repression, and violence, ultimately playing with the framing of the title and the unlocking of doors and eyes.

The Unseen played at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith until December 14th, 2024. Coinciding with the production of The Unseen, an exhibition entitled “Faces of Russian Resistance“, an exhibition that focuses on Russians who oppose the Putin regime and paid for it with their freedom, was displayed in the hallways of Riverside Studios. Is this what America just voted for?