Snow falling on secrets

By LINDA HERRICK

When you ask a playwright to talk about their work, the trick is not getting them to start the usual waffle about characterisation, motivation and inspiration. It can be getting them to stop. But writer-director Gary Henderson, invited to throw some light on his psychological thriller An Unseasonable Fall of Snow, is tight-lipped. Even the publicist for the Maidment Theatre Studio production begs, after sending a copy of the script, that "complete secrecy is maintained regarding the plot twist".

Quite right. There's nothing worse than a thriller, be it play, film or book, when the audience knows what's going to happen. Or when the writer clumsily signposts the twist in the tale long before the finale. So let's just say An Unseasonable Fall of Snow's denouement is a doozie.

"It's a hard one to talk about," agrees Auckland-based Henderson, who has just started a year of teaching and writing as the William Evans Visiting Playwright at the University of Otago. "I like to write things that are not quite what you think they are at the start."

The play began life as a commissioned piece for the 1998 International Arts Festival in Wellington, when the two roles were played by Jeffrey Thomas as the older, seemingly authoritarian figure Arthur, and Damon Andrews as the younger man, Liam.

In March 2001 it had a season in Sydney, coincidentally at the same time another Henderson hit, the unforgettable Skin Tight, was playing in the Sydney Opera House theatre.

"It was a good weekend," recalls Henderson, who flew over to see both. "It was funny though. Skin Tight was originally written as an edgy fringe piece and Snow was commissioned by the festival. But by that stage of their lives, in Sydney, they'd swapped over. Skin Tight was this well-respected piece in the Sydney Opera House, and Snow was in this grungy little theatre at the back of a pub."

The Sydney Morning Herald reviewer approved - although he couldn't say too much about why. "To tell you where this journey goes would ruin it," he wrote, "but Henderson's skill in teasing construction means it's a gradual reveal, which is neither laboured nor obvious ... it's a tight and engrossing mix of concept thriller and moral speculation."

The Maidment Studio season of Fall of Snow features Alistair Browning (Rain) as Arthur, and Owen Black as Liam (currently starring in Mercy Peak as the American engineer Chad); it is directed by Heath Jones and produced by Leonore Carter. The drama is set in a single institutional-type room in Wellington, and snow may have fallen outside recently.

"The idea that it snows means that at a symbolic level it's the idea of something happening out of season, something that shouldn't happen, not in the natural order of things," says Henderson.

He hopes to visit Auckland to see the production, and also catch the AK03 presentation of Carl Nixon's The Book of Fame, which he directed. "I do enjoy observing the audience when the penny starts to drop but I am always nervous," he says of Snow.

"It's a tightrope that you walk. You have to drop clues in. If you're too obscure the audience just won't get it and they will get confused and annoyed. But you don't want to make it too obvious so they get it early on.

"If I have to make a choice, I try to be obscure, assuming the audience is smart enough to get it."

Performance

* What: An Unseasonable Fall of Snow

* Where & when: Maidment Studio Theatre, from today until September 27