Rosie Sheehy and Jamie Ballard in An Interrogation at Hampstead Theatre. Photo by Marc BrennerWithin the confines of an intimate police interview room, a relatively informal session of consensual questioning is about to get underway. The cagey but willing participant is a well-connected, middle-aged white male. The interrogator, a gently reassuring younger woman who is clearly more savvy than she is letting on.
Ruth Palmer (Rosie Sheehy) just wants to be able to eliminate the man on the other side of the table, from her investigations, but Cameron Andrews (Jamie Ballard) seems too calm, perhaps a little too well-prepared and definitely too well connected to be innocent!
Sarah Mercadé has kept to a simple one-room set in which the square interview table is angled to ensure the protagonists broadly face the audience. There are a few random chairs and behind them is a water dispenser. Layered, to add variety and interest, are hidden camera feeds directed above and below the table, which relay close-ups of faces and fidgeting hands to a screen behind, adding tension as the dialogue progresses. It is an effective device which layers the cat and mouse game by turning the audience into intimate voyeurs able to scrutinise the flicker of an eye lid, the lean of a head, or the nervous, beneath-table hand-wringing.
The remarkably simple premise is more usually deployed in television dramas, but here the 90min running time demands our focus, interest and attention, as we each momentarily convince our sleuthing selves that we’ve discerned some salient nugget or other with which the cat (or mouse) has given themself away.
For all that the subject matter provides a grim and sobering backdrop, the gentle feminine entrapment remains disarming and the exchanges, remarkably civil. Writer and Director Jamie Armitage allows the actors to subtly reveal their characters’ back stories (a broken-off engagement, an overbearing mother) as they circle, exploring the means to politely get under each other's skin. The measured pace encourages nuance with the creation of trip hazards and disarming tangents, all of which add a collective frisson of jeopardy. Armitage has already gained some notoriety as a director and with this, his debut play, he is most definitely one to watch.
AN INTERROGATION runs at the Hampstead Theatre downstairs, until 22nd Feb.
