By Nicolas Billon. Directed by Kevin McKendrick. At the Cultch’s Historic Theatre on Wednesday, March 21. Continues until March 31

A metal desk, a plastic chair, a filing cabinet. The setting for Nicolas Billon’s Butcher is a grey room full of grey objects, but the action is all red.

The room is the office of Insp. Lamb (Daryl Shuttleworth). It’s 3 a.m. on Christmas Day in a Toronto police station and he’s had a peculiar case dropped into his lap. A woozy old man (Peter Anderson) in a foreign military uniform has been dumped at the station. He has a meat hook hung around his neck, along with the business card of Hamilton Barnes (Noel Johansen).

The old man only speaks an obscure Slavic language called Lavinian. At Lamb’s invitation, Barnes shows up, but has no explanation of who he is or why the elderly man has his card.

Lamb recruits a translator (Lindsey Angell) and the mysterious game is afoot. The fictional Lavinia fought a gruesome civil war 22 years ago, and we learn that the people in this room are still reckoning with its horrors.

There’s a little of Death and the Maiden and Munich in the entertaining riddle Billon has made for us to unravel. It’s complex enough that the reveals are surprising, but not so baroque that we can’t guess our way ahead of the action.

Billon worked with two linguists to create the Lavinian language. Peter Anderson has the difficult job of exclusively speaking Lavinian, but he conveys so much in this very foreign tongue.

It’s hard to write a thriller like this without some clichés. Another rewrite might have dispensed with clunkers like “So you see, this isn’t amateur hour” and “He won’t give in to your tyranny!” At times, the dialogue sounded like outtakes from Law & Order: Slavic Unit.

Director Kevin McKendrick and set designer David Roberts have staged the show on a raised square. The office furniture means that almost all the action happens on a downstage section no larger than an apartment balcony. I see how this claustrophobic effect might be meant to double down on the show’s tension, but it felt more limiting than effective. The blocking sometimes felt like kids rolling around on the living-room floor.

In those tight confines, the performers didn’t manage all the stage business—handcuffs, phones, a many-pocketed backpack—as smoothly as I would have expected. This may just have been a symptom of opening-night jitters.

Butcher is a classic locked-room thriller. In 85 intense minutes, we watch a deception unravel and the weight of history come to rest on the characters’ shoulders. We’re asked, in the aftermath of genocide: do we want peace or justice? The play argues that we can’t have both.