Making a Killing was staged at the Flavel Arts Centre Friday, April 10.

History has a habit of holding up a mirror to the present, and Ben Kernow’s gripping two-hander, uses that mirror to unsettling and memorable effect.

Inspired by the diary of Frantz Schmidt, Nuremberg’s resident executioner for 45 years in the sixteenth century, this is a play that wears its historical credentials lightly while landing its contemporary relevance with considerable force.

Schmidt carried out hundreds of executions, a role inherited from his father, though he harboured ambitions far removed from the gallows.

That tension between duty, conscience and personal aspiration sits at the very heart of this production.

The two performers carry an extraordinary weight, inhabiting not just their principal characters but a whole gallery of townspeople — a corrupt bishop, an innkeeper proud of his sausage recipe, a wife perpetually searching for her husband.

Each transition was a masterclass in physical and vocal craft.

Posture shifted, facial expression transformed, voice pitch, tone and intonation adjusted with precision and confidence. It was acting of the highest order, making the absence of a larger cast entirely irrelevant.

The plot’s central tension is urgently topical.

Schmidt and his apprentice Claus find themselves locked in an increasingly desperate moral debate: what does a person of conscience do when the machinery of power demands their agreement and support?

Bringing Making a Killing to the Flavel Arts Centre represents an exciting and ambitious step for the venue.

Dartmouth audiences are fortunate to have access to theatre of this calibre on their doorstep, and the Flavel deserves real credit for programming work that challenges and provokes as well as entertains.

The audience, while modest in number, witnessed something genuinely special.

Hopefully, word will spread, and if the Flavel continues to attract productions of this quality, it will steadily build the reputation it deserves as a destination for serious, thought-provoking theatre.