Theatre preview: Belleville, Herald Theatre

Karima Madut (left) and Tawanda Manyimo portray an affable French-Senegalese couple. Photo / Alt Group

Oliver Driver rakes his fingers through his hair and fixes me with an inquiring gaze as he weighs whether or not to tell me the ending of Belleville, the play he is directing for Silo Theatre. "If I tell you, it can't leave this room but it will help when it comes to writing the story."

So I nod and he does the big reveal which leaves me quite sure I won't tell anyone because to know would indeed spoil it. Then again, even knowing, I'm intrigued to see whether America playwright Amy Herzog can pilot her characters - there are just four in Belleville - to their final destination without it becoming obvious along the way.

Herzog's concern in Belleville is to examine how Generation Y defines and measures success, but the play is not a straight drama. Voted by the New York Times as one of the top 10 plays of last year, it has been described by some critics as suspenseful as any Hitchcock film.

Driver and actors Sophie Henderson, Matt Whelan, Karima Madut and Tawanda Manyimo will play it very much as a psychological thriller with slow-burn twists keeping an audience on edge.

"What we're trying to do is to make it tense and evoke in audiences the same sorts of feelings you get when you are watching a really good thriller; they should be trying to figure out what's really going on here and perhaps fearing for the safety of the characters," says Driver.

"This play is all about the subtext underneath the lines and I hope the audience will feel uncomfortable and discombobulated because what they're seeing is not necessarily what the characters are saying."

Silo's new artistic director Sophie Roberts didn't programme the play; credit for that goes to her predecessor Shane Bosher. However, she says it's the sort of play she'd schedule, particularly because it's rare to see a thriller in theatre.

"Thrillers can be harder to do and fail in the theatre when they try to replicate film but this play doesn't do that. It's not about bells and whistles and pyrotechnics. It's completely about the relationships and the idea of how well do you actually know the person you're sleeping next to?"

Belleville is set in Paris but it's not the City of Love more commonly seen on stage or screen. There are no French people in it and the multi-ethnic suburb of Belleville, despite meaning "beautiful town", isn't on a list of the top 10 things to see when you are there.

It is Herzog's way of messing with the stereotypical idealism of Paris and young love itself. Main characters Zack (Whelan) and Abby (Henderson) are clean-cut young Americans living seemingly principled lives: he is a doctor working for Doctors Without Borders; she teaches yoga.

The only other people we see are their landlords, the affable French-Senegalese couple Alioune (Manyimo) and his more outspoken wife Amina (Madut).

The foreignness of each character creates a sense of dislocation which is shot through the play. Manyimo and Madut say they can certainly bring their own experiences to that.

"I've lived in New Zealand for 15 years and I feel I'm fairly well assimilated to the culture and I don't feel like I don't belong here. So I do find it odd when people ask where I come from and treat me like a stranger in a strange land," says Madut, 21, who is Sudanese but was born in Kenya.

Both have been involved with the Mixit programme in Auckland, which provides a platform for young people with refugee backgrounds to join Kiwi and other migrant youth to work together on creative arts projects.

Madut appeared in A Thousand Hills while Manyimo, 33, was in the play Gwen in Purgatory as well as, across the Ditch, the Australian film The Rover alongside Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson. He is starting to get more work offers from overseas but says for the moment he's more than content to test himself with a play like Belleville. "It's got a very particular energy and you want to honour that rhythm as well as the complexity in these characters but, at the same time, keep it entertaining."

What: Belleville
Where: Herald Theatre
When: August 28-September 20