As part of Park Theatre’s Make Mine A Double season, Further Theatre is presenting Tunnels in association with Park Theatre between 28th November – 10th December.
Based on the real-life escape stories of the men and women who burrowed under the Berlin Wall in 1968, Tunnels portrays the daring escape of cousins Paul and Freddie Metz during the height of the Cold War.
This claustrophobic play, accompanied by live music, takes place entirely underground and highlights the struggles of living in one of the most tightly controlled surveillance regimes in history, where neither cousin has a concept of Berlin without the Wall. Paul is driven by the ideological need to escape communism, while Freddie dreams of materialistic wealth in the West. Their motives may differ, but their goal remains the same, will their tunnel lead to freedom or bury them under an avalanche of dirt?
The only obstacles in their way are a 20 metre ‘death strip’, hundreds of landmines and the East German secret police, the Stasi. Tunnels tells a tale of love, loyalty, family, nationhood and of course… digging. The show premiered at Army@TheFringe at Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Make Mine a Double is a season of four shows starting mid-November and running for four weeks, programmed to give emerging artists and companies a chance to present their work in short run double bills. The new strand of work aims to give theatre makers a lower-cost and lower-risk way of producing new work in the Finsbury Park venue, as well as offering multi-buy tickets to encourage local audiences to see compelling new work. Tunnels is programmed in a double bill with Press, a play that explores the freedoms afforded to the press in the UK compared to some other countries.
Writer and performer Oliver Yellop said: “I have always been fascinated by history, in particular the Cold War and what was behind the Iron Curtain. It seemed so interesting to me that just months before I was born there was this totally different world that had all of a sudden collapsed. I felt that lockdown for many of us was a liminal space, we didn’t quite know where we were or where this strange time would lead us, but somehow, we had to keep going forward. That is where the idea of digging came from, digging deep, inch by inch into the unknown.”
Further Theatre is an Essex based theatre company that specializes in exploring little known narratives and stories throughout history and presents these stories in an engaging and dynamic style for contemporary audiences. The company also works with live musicians to create original scores for our shows creating theatre as an imaginative, physical and aural experience. Previous shows include I am Gavrilo Princip at Army@TheVirtualFringe in 2020 and at the Bush Theatre in 2022.
