Roswell, New Mexico, 1947. A rancher finds metallic debris dropped from an empty sky. The government says it’s a weather balloon, yet rumours quickly begin to spread: of aliens, of spacecraft, of a military plot. But what if the conspiracy runs deeper still? In the shadowy world of this noir pastiche, it wasn’t a flying saucer that hit Roswell that day… it was really a [redacted].

It’s fitting that the poster shows blanked-out words, because it’s imagery rather than language that defines this show. With little beyond their own bodies, the four-member cast conjure birds, doors, motor-cars; there are chases, there are battles, there are extravagant falls from every conceivable height. The style is funniest when it plays on overused screen tropes, with a fight in an obscure but recognisable setting a particular delight. Other scenes pose more of a riddle and the fun lies in unpacking them, applying your imagination to bodies and limbs until the picture they’re forming snaps into focus.

There are gentler scenes too, as we learn what drives our intrepid protagonist, and beneath all the humour there’s a disturbing edge – a warning of the corrosive power of conspiracy thinking. The framework of the story is pleasingly familiar: there’s the dogged journalist, the sinister recurring figure with an unspecified foreign accent, the mismatched pair of honest cops determined to find the truth. And it’s all propelled by suspenseful live music, performed on guitar and drums from the side of the stage.

But the crispness of the physical performance isn’t quite matched by the dialogue, and more than once a line was lost to an overplayed parody voice. The detective duo’s buddy-film swagger outstayed its welcome with me, and while the knowingly hackneyed action plot doesn’t need much explanation, there were still a few moments when I lost the thread.

Though perhaps a little confusion is fitting too. For a while I wondered if we’d ever learn what [redacted] is – but they do tell us in the end, with a cleverly self-referential twist that brings the show’s darker ideas neatly into focus. This is a fun and creative production, with more emotional weight than its gleefully clichéd styling might imply. It won’t stay secret for long.