Review: The Unseen (Riverside Studios)

Review by Harry Bower

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In the programme notes, writer Craig Wright describes his new dramatic, wordy prison play The Unseen, as a story about ‘how heavy things sink to the bottom, and light things float to the top’. Fundamentally it is a play about power and a social commentary on the role of belief and faith in society. If that sounds a bit heavy, then imagine the layered narrative building on Russian dissidents and prisoners of a totalitarian regime and a daily routine of torture and interrogation. It’s not a bit heavy - it’s a lot heavy. It’s also, at times, brilliant.

Valdez and Wallace are prisoners together, somewhere inside an unnamed totalitarian regime which is clearly Russia (the ‘special operation’ is referenced). In adjacent cells, separated by concrete walls, they have never seen each other’s faces. And yet they keep each other company with word games for hours, only stopping when it’s time for the daily prison-mandated interrogations or to recover from the brutality inflicted upon them by sadistic guards. In part thanks to its brilliant set and costume, at times this existence threatens to feel so real it’s impossible to escape the feeling that you are intruding; somehow trapped looking in on real life misery playing out in front of you. The completely absorbing silences and desperately engaging emotional performance by Waj Ali is genuinely captivating. Pretty quickly though The Unseen, with a chunky verging-on-pretentious paragraph of dialogue, snaps you out of it.

I may sound like I am being critical. In fact, these two characters are intentionally drawn as extreme ends of the human spectrum. Wallace is the pragmatist; the logical thinker. Played by the always brilliant Richard Harrington, he is painfully pedantic in his approach to language, the known laws of science and physics, and grounded in reality. Wallace is a presumed agnostic who believes in things he can feel, and touch. Having spent time debating politics with his wife, and living a decent chunk of his life before incarceration, his eyes are fully open to his predicament. He loves explaining things to people. Irritating to share a cellblock with? Almost certainly yes. 

Valdez is desperate for hope. Earnest but lost, floundering, but desperate to find meaning or interpretation in things which are unknown, he is fundamentally at odds with his peer. Having been locked up while performing onstage for a misplaced interview comment, he has been blindsided by his imprisonment and feels hopeless. The two butt heads but it seems basically get on alright, not that they have a choice. It is when Valdez reveals his secret that things get a bit rocky; he has been communicating with another cellblock resident - a woman, whom he believes to be some sort of creator or deity. 

In several tense scenes which largely successfully avoid the descent into full shouting matches, the pair exchange metaphorical points of view about faith, disguised loosely by plot. The intersection of faith, power, and locked up Russian dissidents is absolutely fascinating and ripe for exploration. It is an inevitable challenge to tell this story, in a static prison, without it descending into monotonous verbal tennis - and the piece does well to avoid that with only the occasional foul serve. Sometimes Valdez is portrayed as lacking intelligence and oftentimes is very clearly losing the argument, but he is admirably persistent nonetheless. The challenge is that giving ‘god’ or ‘faith’ in this sense a fake persona, something which sounds objectively like it could never be true, immediately puts the believer on the back foot with the audience. The audience never truly sees the merits of the argument - even those audience members who do have faith - because it’s an invented deity which is plainly ridiculous. If the piece intends for the prospect of a higher power to be seen as ridiculous, and the message of the show is one of agnosticism or atheism, then mission accomplished - there are very few concessions. 

The power struggle thread in the piece is embodied by conscience-burdened ‘Smash’, a guard charged with watching over and then torturing the prisoners for answers. Ross Tomlinson has a really tough job here. Smash first appears half way through the piece. What is a calm and interesting but generally peaceful environment is blown to smithereens by his arrival. Part of the point of Smash as a character is that he represents basically an entire state; the elite, powerful cross section of society that makes decisions on others’ behalf, pulls the strings in our lives, and controls the way we view the world. That’s a pretty big responsibility for one actor - though Tomlinson is clearly up to the task. What begins as an intentionally jarring performance transforms as the character’s relevance becomes clearer, into a magnificent turn which culminates in an extremely graphic, and brilliant, retelling of a murder. Not for the squeamish.

For a play called ‘The Unseen’, there is a distinct irony in the lighting design being one of the best I’ve seen this year. The dim minimalist prison environment screams oppression thanks to Anna Watson who has played a blinder here. On a cold November evening the aesthetic makes it feel even colder than it is and I particularly love how contemporary the design makes the prison look, in stark juxtaposition with the collective West’s mind’s eye of an eighties movie Russian prison.

Mostly, I really enjoyed The Unseen. Sometimes it is an extremely blunt instrument used to beat its message as hard as a guard with a truncheon might hit their prisoners; other times it is more nimble in its navigation of themes - a real mixed bag of subtlety. That’s not entirely a bad thing though I did find myself holding back the occasional eye roll - and that’s coming from an open agnostic. It is however impossible to claim that it is not a show worth seeing. The real equivalents of such stories as this are quite literally, as the corridor exhibition and programme notes remind us, everywhere in the world in 2024. Hundreds are imprisoned in regimes and there is a tangible sense of helplessness, not just for those locked away but their families and loved ones too. This piece goes partway to opening some eyes and reminds us of the dark dehumanising consequences some people pay for speaking their truth.

The Unseen plays at Riverside Studios until Saturday 14 December 2024. For more information visit: https://riversidestudios.co.uk/see-and-do/the-unseen-132224/

Photos by Manuel Harlan