Writer: Oliver Yellop
Director: Colin Ellwood
From its construction in 1961 until it was torn down in the late 1980s, the Berlin Wall was the most visible symbol of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Separating USSR-controlled East Berlin from the freedom offered by the west of the city, it also became the barrier across which many East Germans would attempt to escape.
One method to evade capture was digging underneath it, through the city’s clay soil and hoping to evade detection. Such is the setting for Oliver Yellop’s Tunnels, in which cousins Paul (Lewis Bruniges) and Freddie (Yellop) attempt to dig for freedom.
By Yellop taking on the character of the more optimistic, gung-ho Freddie, he allows a hefty slice of the play’s emotional content to fall upon Bruniges’s shoulders. Paul is a haunted man, who was previously imprisoned and tortured after attempting to climb the wall.
Bruniges portrays Paul’s creeping claustrophobia well, and the flashbacks to his previous experience help to create a rounded whole. Yellop makes a nice contrast, his Freddie being a gregarious wideboy with plenty of friends, even a nice girlfriend he hopes to bring through the tunnel once it is complete.
While Yellop’s writing is sometimes a little too expositional, it conveys a sense of what East Berlin in the 1960s may have been like. The sense of paranoia, that anyone you meet or pass on the street could either be a Stasi spy or be about to be recruited to become one, lends effective weight to the cousins’ desire to escape.
Director Colin Ellwood makes generous use of lighting, sound and movement work to give a sense of the tunnel’s confined space. That sense of containment means that as the cousins’ differences with each other become more fraught, something’s got to give. And while some of the plotting to get to the finale is shakier than one might hope for, the play’s final moments are carried by Bruniges’s fine portrayal of a man on the edge.
Continues until 10 December 2022
