The Unseen @ Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London

In a Waiting for Godot style play by Craig Wright, we encounter two prisoners in their cells, and occasionally their brutal but troubled guard. We experience something of what their daily lives and living conditions are like, and honour Russian prisoners of conscience who are similarly caged, tortured and humiliated for speaking out against Putin and his war. Or for singing a song at a wedding, for tone of voice during a reading or in the case of one of the prisoners in the play, for playing Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac.

One of the prisoners is young, gentle and an actor, Valdez (Waj Ali). The other is an older, learned doctor Wallace (Richard Harrington), who still keeps his cell tidy in a medically minded way. They play a game to pass the time, taking a wild list of objects starting with every letter of the alphabet to the seaside. There’s also the mystery of the middle cell which occupies the space between their cells. We start to care for both of them and to worry about Valdez as he dreamily and mournfully stares into space or painfully, gingerly lowers himself into a sitting position after an ‘encounter’ with the guard ‘Smash’ (Ross Tomlinson).

Minimal staging by Simon Kenny effectively utilises alarms, flashing lights and the suggestion of very bare and unhygienic cells. From time to time their guard aggressively crashes into the scene and takes one of them away, normally the younger prisoner. And seemingly delights in humiliating and terrorising him.

However, they’ve all started speaking to and with each other. They are known and so is he — although it’s against the rules for the guard and prisoners to chat. Uniquely, as well as exploring what it means to be a prisoner of conscience, the writing explores the impact on the guard’s psyche, conscience, humanity of doing what they do (day in, day out). As he says himself, he didn’t start out planning to a cruel person, this wasn’t his chosen career option. His conscience is being pained by empathy every day, even as he does ‘his job’. He plots to rub out the prisoners’ humanity — cutting out eyes, taking out tongues, destroying flesh. But humans gonna human — he can’t ignore what he’s doing to the personhood, the humanity, the emotions and flesh of others — and their pain. He literally feels it and he can’t stop it troubling him. And wanting it to stop.

Under Iya Patarkatsishvili’s direction, sound is used powerfully to suggest waiting and terror. Smash’s smashing of his truncheon against a metal bench can’t help but make you jump and squirm. The suggestion is powerful on the mind and the imagination. Carefully the play avoids glorifying violence or brutality, instead suggesting with hoods, painful movements and the smashing of wood against metal. And uses silence powerfully suggesting unease and waiting.

In a brutal ending, the guard sets the prisoners free, disgusted with himself and what he’s become — an eraser and denier of the humanity of other humans. It’s also incredibly sad as we get into the psychology of prisoners — that prisons are in the mind as well as literal.

The exhibition beforehand ‘Faces of Russian Resistance’ about real Russian prisoners of conscience will have you weeping before you even go into the play — which will make you cry even more. And so it should. Gut punching, emotional, troubling, sickening and sad by turns, there is also humour — and humanity. The intimate cast of three are quite wonderful in drawing us into their world and their characters’ experiences, particularly in Ross Tomlinson humanising such an unpleasant person and showing us his conflicted distress at what he’s doing in his ‘day job’.

Very different to Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, this is very Godot like in its waiting characters and their streams of consciousness monologues/dialogues. But it touches the heart and calls us to compassionate action.

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