A youngish man, bleary in sweats and a puffer jacket, stumbles into a brightly lit room. The room is professional in its blandness: fold-out table and chairs, whiteboard and coffee machine, graceless fluorescent lamp. He is beckoned in by a suited man, a few decades his senior and brandishing a file folder, full of what we can only assume is incriminating information.
An Unseasonable Fall of Snow is a darkly clever little play. Revived capably last week at the Old Fire Station by new company Roughyed Urchins, it’s been described in the past as a psychological thriller or a cat-and-mouse game. While there is no shortage of suspense in the piece, I would say there is less of a building sense of dread and more of a series of skirmishes.
Right from the beginning, the interrogator, played with the right degree of nerves and menace by Ian Gain, betrays his own overwhelm and lack of confidence, which creates a compelling wobbliness to the dynamic between the two men. You’ll assume you know the familiar scene that’s playing out, but right from the start, something’s a bit off.
The suspect (Chris Lane) meanwhile, has the haziness of someone who’s woken still a bit drunk from the night before. Lane does a good job of maintaining authenticity as he swings between bewildered and belligerent.
The dialogue has a nice, quippy ping-pong quality to it, and rings true to the ear. My only criticism would be that the play hits on multiple major themes - violence, male privilege, the financial crisis of 2008 - over the course of its run, and doesn’t always do enough to tie them together into one story. Not that a play needs a message - definitely not - or should be regulated to having a single focus. But a great piece of writing will use its themes to illuminate one another. Here, it seemed to lack coherence at times, despite the actors working hard to sell it.
There was also the questionable idea of staging it ‘in the round’, with seating on three sides of the actors. This production is touring, and it may be that Old Fire Station was simply not a conductive venue for it, but I could not see one of the actor’s faces for the first twenty minutes of the show, which was distracting. Instead of being immersive, it actually distanced me from the goings-on in the play.
More positively there is the ending, which is a major twist. I can’t say much more about it, but it is unexpected and satisfying, and it left me thinking about the play long after it was over. It could be read as a metaphor for trauma and bad behaviour repeating down generations, or maybe not. In any case, it’s well worth going to see for yourself.