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Over four nights in February 1999, the writer and art historian John Berger, Theatre de Complicitie's director Simon McBurney and the actress Sandra Voe conducted an intimate 30,000 year old journey, inscribing a downward line through time 30 metres below central London. They began at the disused Strand Station on the line which ran between Holborn and Aldwych. These five audio recordings - originally released on a CD soon after The Vertical Line performances - describe, in their own words, a little of what they saw along the way.
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Read transcriptMyahko styelit da zhostko spat'
You make a soft bed said the Russian grandmother and then sleeping on it, it is hard.
Where are you?
In a vertical line, we are 30 metres below London, in the abandoned Aldwych underground station.
Bush House and the BBC are up there.
Where are you?
In a horizontal line we are 734 yards from Holborn underground station.
You can walk it if you like.
Where are you now?
We are taking a vertical line through time.
If you listen carefully, we have just passed the Middle Ages.
This singing is Corsican - they say some of the harmonies pre-date Christianity.
Only hear animals now. We've arrived in Egypt at the time when the Gospels of the New Testament were being written.