Theatre review: An Unseasonable Fall of Snow, The Basement

Michael Hurst in 'An Unseasonable Fall of Snow'.

The twist in Gary Henderson's short 1998 mystery is just the right level of difficult: it's solvable but hard enough that you'll feel pleased you got it, with the help of some cleverly-spaced clues. On opening night, the solution was revealed earlier than the script indicates, possibly deliberately; this focussed attention on the second-half debate about moral responsibility.

With slicked ash-blond hair, pin-stripe blue shirt and drawn demeanour, Michael Hurst as Arthur looks like an inspector in a Scandinavian detective novel. But all is not as it seems; for one, he and his young interviewee, Liam (Ryan Richards), are speaking about Wellington.

This is an interrogation, about possibly sleazy and violent events, so one naked lightbulb hangs in front of Ben Anderson's interesting semi-abstract backdrop. Talk of jigsaw pieces takes place on a floor missing tile pieces, while a soothing wallpaper pattern is half hidden by jumbled boxes; balance obscured by chaos. "Lawyers are after victory ... I'm after the truth," says Arthur.

Directed by Matt Baker, Hurst keeps Arthur nicely close and guarded, while Richards' Liam is a nervous and flickering counterpoint. The tempo could be picked up just a little, given it's a mostly sedentary, word-based play.

Henderson is one of our more intellectual playwrights, and the characters make some pithy and telling observations. Arthur asks Liam whether he is "a past man or a future man", because nobody is ever just in the moment.

In this Theatre of Love production, Arthur is so plausible it's tempting to think of his messages as the direct messages of the play. Instead, of course, no truth can ever be the whole truth. It's arguably most interesting to think of Arthur as a very unreliable mouthpiece.

The discussion on "rights" is intriguing, but Arthur's unchallenged presentation of other big ideas is angry, full of judgement, blame and recrimination - even while Arthur is telling Liam off for his lack of empathy. A deliberate irony perhaps: an atomised play about atomised figures.

What: An Unseasonable Fall of Snow
Where and when: The Basement, to August 9