Theatre

Quinn, a fine-art painter but also a relentless home redecorator, shares the house left to him by his mother with a lodger. The latter, Moore, is a dapper pinstriped suit-wearing ‘businessman’ who bears strange wounds and makes obscene phonecalls in the middle of the night. When the enigmatic pair’s uncosy idyll (they address one another formally as ‘Mr’) is disturbed by the arrival of the hardly less enigmatic Ray, adopted by the aestheticising Quinn in part because he likes the way the younger man catches the light (there’s a strong gay subtext throughout), the status quo is threatened. Why did Ray really come to Quinn’s house? And why does Moore suddenly put on a clown’s costume?

There’s more than a hint of the Pinters about Neil Flynn’s sharply scripted but exaggeratedly mannered debut play, which was plucked for production from the 600 entries to the Warehouse Theatre’s 2007 International Playwriting Festival. Ambiguity and menace permeate every line, with the über-opaque characters taking a self-conscious, slightly threatening pleasure in their words, and with the most mundane objects (salt shakers) and subjects of conversation (the perfect cup of tea) accruing unwonted emotional resonance.

John Oliver’s Moore is a mixture of finicky fastidiousness and sudden volcanic rages, while Lee Colley gives deadpan delinquent Ray an intriguing mercurial quality. But Ted Craig’s production is really held together by Robert Austin’s bluff, sympathetic Quinn – he almost makes you care enough to want to puzzle out what’s going on under the surface here.