The Unseen
Riverside Studios, London

CRAIG WRIGHT’s deft and thought-provoking script set in an isolation wing for political prisoners shows little evidence of its initial commission as a play about Jesus. Instead, the taut drama is based round the relationship of two contrasting prisoners and their violent yet troubled guard.

In near adjacent cells, Wallace, an articulate analytical doctor and Valdez, a reticent yet impassioned former actor have established a long-standing relationship based only on their verbal exchanges, frequently based around word games.

Both men’s supposed crimes would be laughable if the punishment was not so cruel and enduring. Regular questioning and torture is employed to break them and yet they have found means to remain human. Wallace, the cynical realist, uses language, memory and order to make sense of his brutally curtailed existence, while Valdez has turned to a metaphysical and mystical view of their prison microcosm.

Add to this a brutally angry guard suffering from guilt, and the play becomes an allegory about the cruelly oppressive nature of many people’s lives and the two extremes for dealing with it, rather than opting out.

Richard Harrington creates a sharp and amusing character as Wallace, a pedantic wordsmith bent on keeping track of time from the regular sirens, and retaining a grip on his sanity by rationalising the ongoing torment, while Waj Ali’s emotionally troubled Valdez has conjured up a universal being to offer hope and a possible escape from the suffering.

Iya Patarkatsishvili’s pacey direction ensures the largely static production maintains a high level of tension as the exchanges, varying in tempo and emotion, gradually reveal the men behind the words.

The nervously awaited arrival of their torturer, Ross Tomlinson’s Smash, introduces another element, initially more akin to Rik Mayall’s violent character in Bottom. The sadistic caricature, representing the cruelty of the external forces, loses any element of farce after a particularly graphic monologue describing ripping a prisoner apart in a futile attempt to assuage his own sense of guilt. 

Simon Kenny’s bleak set showing only the foundations of both cells in front of an echoing metal walkway with a black backdrop of loudspeakers and red warning lights is suitably atmospheric and symbolic of a frighteningly oppressive world endured by far too many. 

Runs until December 14. Box Office: 020 8237 1000, riversidestudios.co.uk