Review: Borders: Digital, Political, Emotional

©️Borders, Photo by Lidia Crisafulli

Meteatra’s debut production, Borders: Digital, Political, Emotional, is a carefully constructed landscape of unease.

Directed by Secil Honeywill, this six-play production resists grand declarations and easy moralising. Instead, it builds a mosaic of recognisable lives under pressure. A dinner party between humans and AI becomes a sharp dissection of authenticity and replacement anxiety. A corporate office exposes how easily diversity rhetoric fractures under scrutiny. A cramped kitchen turns into a space of queer resilience and survival. Elsewhere, migration, exile and ecological despair surface in fleeting encounters and intimate conversations.

The plays vary widely in length, tone and texture, moving from satire to lyrical storytelling, yet this variation feels purposeful. The fragmentation mirrors the fractured world the production reflects, and the pieces accumulate into a shared atmosphere.

Honeywill keeps the transitions fluid, allowing the audience to sit in discomfort rather than rushing toward resolution. The lighting design by Richard Williamson and sound design by Neil McKeown are central to shaping the emotional architecture of the evening. Subtle shifts in light and sound redraw the boundaries of the same stage space, creating new emotional territories without overwhelming the performances.

What resonates most is the refusal to treat borders purely as political lines on a map. These works interrogate emotional and digital boundaries with equal urgency. The border between empathy and distance when suffering happens elsewhere.

The most powerful moment arrives in the final piece, One of Them by Tamara von Werthern. A single woman speaks about the mechanics of daily life, routines, small irritations, ordinary concerns. Gradually the outside world presses in, violence, relentless news, the feeling that catastrophe is constant yet distant. The monologue reveals how global instability seeps into the smallest domestic spaces.

The closing line, “we are one of them”, lands as recognition rather than accusation. Solidarity emerges not through grand gestures but through acknowledging proximity. The bravery here is domestic, hidden within everyday anxieties. In that admission of shared vulnerability, the production finds its emotional centre. For a long moment, the audience sits in silence. The world feels both unbearably large and intimately close.

As a debut, Meteatra announces itself as a company interested in connection, creating theatre that reflects a world where borders are constantly in flux, multiplying and dissolving all at once. However, for all its thematic ambition, the evening can at times feel as splintered as the world it portrays. Several segments gesture toward richer emotional and political terrain than they have space to fully explore, and a stronger sense of development and transition between the pieces might allow the connections to land with greater force.

★★★

For more information about this production, please visit: https://www.arcolatheatre.com/event/borders/

Credits:

Director: Secil Honeywill
Lighting Designer: Richard Williamson
Sound Designer: Neil McKeown
Founders & Producers: Ece Ozdemiroglu, Serpil Delice, Apo Tercanli
Associate Producer: Lucie Regan
Production Assistant: Joanna “Asia” Rob
Graphic designer: Ailsa Sinclair
Image: Nick Fancher