As a theatrical opening, it’s about as dramatic as they come. A Toronto police inspector is working the Christmas Eve shift when a man turns up on his station’s doorstep. The stranger is drugged and wearing an old military uniform and a Santa cap, with a butcher’s hook hanging around his neck. The macabre device impales a card that bears the words “Arrest me.”

So begins Butcher, a twisty, dark thriller that touches on big questions about justice and truth—questions that, its cast says, could apply to everything from the Syrian refugee crisis to the #MeToo movement to Indigenous reconciliation.

But best of all, Governor General’s Award–winning playwright Nicolas Billon takes on those hard issues in the context of nail-biting suspense. “For many audience members, it will feel almost TV-ish, with the police station, a lawyer, and a guy in distress. It’s that perfect Law and Order ‘We get to solve this’—and then he turns it on its head,” says Darryl Shuttleworth, who plays the good-humoured Toronto inspector, sitting with director Kevin McKendrick in the Jim Green House Studio beside the Cultch after rehearsal. “I’m hopeful the audience will do as I did when I read it, which is gasp and say, ‘That’s not what I thought would happen!’ Almost every scene, he [Billon] keeps flipping things.”

The two are part of a local collective of theatre veterans who came together for the sole purpose of staging Butcher, which has won accolades for its productions in Toronto, Ottawa, and Calgary. McKendrick reports the group spent five days “just talking” about the play, which wades into tough issues like war crimes and torture. The script comes with a foreword by Louise Arbour, former prosecutor for the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and with warnings of depictions of violence.

“There are some unsavoury things in the play and emotional things in the play,” McKendrick says. “It’s asking, ‘What’s appropriate revenge if you have suffered?’ Certainly at the level of genocide, but other levels too.

“We want to find simple answers to who’s right and who’s wrong,” he adds, “but it’s so much more complex than that. You can’t reduce it to that.”

Perhaps the script’s biggest challenge is that the stranger who shows up on the station doorstep speaks “Lavinian”—a Slavic-sounding language invented by two language professors for Butcher. This poses huge challenges for actor Peter Anderson, who must not only speak the made-up tongue fluently, but understand everything it means, explains the director.

“The audience should be able to tell that this is something he’s embarrassed to say or this is something he’s proud to say,” McKendrick explains.

It’s equally crucial to the way Butcher works that the audience not understand the language, leaving it as disoriented as the inspector.

Shuttleworth says the script alludes to atrocities. Adds McKendrick: “Hopefully, by putting it in Lavinia, the audience can just bear witness to the argument,” and not get bogged down in specific events.

“These are the kind of plays that are going to save theatre,” comments Shuttleworth. “It’s not just telling a ripping yarn and not just telling a story, but addressing the chasms that exist between people.”

Prime Cuts Collective presents Butcher at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre from Tuesday to next Saturday (March 20 to 31).