One Under

“We behave like selfish animals on the underground,” runs an especially resonant line in PartingShot’s One Under, a devised theatre piece that searches real life testimonies from tube passengers to find a kind of poetry in the dirty, sweaty, claustrophobic rat race that’s run every day beneath London’s streets.

In an opening section almost like a dance piece, four cast members move in and out of an imagined train in choreographed sequence miming to audio interviews with a cross-section of Londoners, who each respond with surprising candour to questions about their underground experiences. One young female admits to fantasising about being stuck on a broken down train with just JLS for company, while a gruff bloke grumbles about once seeing a woman breast-feeding her baby “just like she was sittin’ at ‘ome.”

The body of the show, however, is dramatised. Via inner monologues, we hear four people—all trapped together in a carriage after an emergency stop—stew in their petty annoyances at fellow travellers and reflect on hopes, joys, tensions and anxieties in their personal lives. An American young professional conducts an imaginary relationship with a stranger sitting across from her and a retired old man philosophically laments losing his wife to vascular dementia.

All told, it’s more gently thought-provoking than it is profound. But the play’s subtle dénouement is uplifting, as that unspoken code of deliberate silence, ignorance and perhaps even mean-spiritedness we all obey in the uncaring rush from A to B momentarily dissolves.