How would you respond if a strange man sat down on a park bench next to you and asked if you were familiar with leaf mulch? Smile benignly? Move to another bench? Or assume he's simply a harmless old soul who wants to talk about compost?
This bizarre conversational gambit is typical of the exchanges that take place throughout Nick Stafford's play. The man on the bench is (or claims to be) David Desouza, whose missing daughter Katherine may have perished at the hands of the so-called John the Baptist, a particularly sadistic serial killer whose victims meet their deaths by water. The woman he approaches is (or claims to be) Fay White, who has recently begun making prison visits to Kevin Cross, a former boyfriend who is charged as (but claims not to be) John the Baptist.
Any summary of the plot needs to be full of qualifications, because it is Stafford's mission to suspend you in a constant state of uncertainty: he unwinds a skein of conversations in which everything you are told has to be taken on trust, yet none of the characters is entirely to be trusted.
Very little actually happens - the action is meted out through dialogues conducted in undertones in semi-public places: a park bench, a bookshop, the visiting room of a prison. Yet each scene subtly erodes the assumptions behind the one before, until the only remaining certainty seems to be that the most we can ever know about another person is whatever tissue of falsehoods they choose to wrap themselves in.
Gwenda Hughes' quietly focused production is handsomely presented on a bare slab of granite, and there are beautifully nuanced performances from Paul McCleary as the bereaved father and Russell Layton as the supposed killer. Emma Pallant is exceptional as the reserved girlfriend whose prison visits seem a tenuous way of reconnecting with a more liberated past. Ged McKenna adds a few welcome grace notes of comedy as a sardonic Scouse prison officer.
The full meaning of this elliptical little piece remains elusive, but the moral is the one your mother instilled at an early age: never talk to strangers.
· Until May 27. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
