Gloomy, funereal music plays as the audience files slowly into the auditorium, passing a stage upon which there are two prisoners wearing grey shirts and trousers confined to separate cells at either end of a three-cell structure.
Wallace (Richard Harrington) wanders around his cell while Valdez (Waj Ali) spends a good deal of his time curled up with an expression of anguish on his face. Although they have never seen each other, they have regularly chatted.
They usually pass the time with word games in which one of them says they went to the seaside and lists the things they bought, but on this occasion, Valdez has something important he wants to say to Wallace, who tries to set that aside as he persists with the game.
Above their cells on the back wall are twenty loudspeakers spaced about three feet apart. Every so often, the sound of a loud, factory-style hooter prompts Wallace to rearrange some object in his cell.
Neither seems to know why they are in prison, though Wallace thinks he might have disrespected the army. All the same, every time he’s tortured, he tells them any old stuff.
The prison guard Smash (Ross Tomlinson) arrives at the block looking and shouting as if he is tortured by the very thought of his job. He insists he finds it painful to hear the prisoners suffering, or see their distress, or to witness their pain. Wallace tells Smash he is “a prisoner of his own empathy.”
Eventually, Valdez tells Wallace that a woman in the next cell has been letting him know about escape tunnels built by the regime and the resistance to the regime who have realised that they “couldn’t survive without each other.” He believes this will be their escape route. But the cell this woman is supposed to occupy in this men’s prison is empty, and the others think the woman is a product of his imagination.
We don’t know where the prison is, though the accents suggest the UK. It is implied the prisoners are there for political reasons, but we don’t know what these reasons are or what the resistance stands for.
Confident, intense acting holds our attention. However, the play seems static, fragmentary and abstract. There is only slight characterisation, the conversations are improbable and what might appear to be a mental crisis for two of the characters along with a scene that seems straight out of a far-fetched nightmare contribute to the play’s lack of plausibility.
It's difficult to work out the purpose of this play beyond contrasting a passive fatalism with an explosive fatalism. It certainly offers us no political or psychological insights into the human condition.
“All ticket proceeds” from the show will be donated to human rights organisations supporting Russian prisoners of conscience in Russia.
The Riverside Studios is mounting a free exhibition of photographs of Russian political prisoners to coincide with the play.