It's not easy to write about this latest experience from National Theatre Wales because all its treats lie in its surprises. So I suggest that if you haven't experienced it and are intending to then you don't read this until afterwards because there's a whole raft of spoilers ahead.
First you have to find Penygroes, a small town that seems to have endless long, narrow streets with no particular pattern to them, at least in the dark of a Snowdonian winter evening.
Then you have to find The Goat, the pub which acts as box office, gathering place and key picking up point.
A few yards away is a house which up to six people enter for a forty minute exposure to weather. The first room is Christmasy and welcoming with a modest helping of food and drink and which is, you slowly realise, decorated with glasses containing the amount of rainwater collected on a particular day in various parts of Snowdonia.
Weather, we are promised, will be present throughout the house. Well that's my main problem with it, apart from one space I never really felt its presence.
One room produces the sound of a ferocious wind as you open the door but it's never other than a theatrical effect.
Penetrating to the cellar you find water falling in torrents, which is effective and spectacular but never feels like weather.
I liked the summer room, full of warmth and with differing summer skies showing on television screens. I also very much liked the upstairs room that was flooded, even if it did feel more like an art installation than a disaster scene.
The one wholly successful weather room was the one filled with dense fog. You really couldn't see your hand in front of your face and slowly edging around the walls was both an unnerving and an exciting experience.
I think, though I wouldn't swear to it, that the room with ambient music, a comfortable chair and a rainbow shaped arrangement of lights in old-fashioned shades, represented the feeling of being able to shut out the outside world – and the weather.
There are no people visibly involved and, as I say, for me the intended main protagonist was also absent. There is a star though and that's the house itself.
There's a thrill to wandering around, opening doors, meeting so much old fashioned furniture.
My other absolute high spot was finding a bathroom with moss on every surface and a palpable smell of damp permeating everything. Like the flood this almost became art in making a drab room something macabrely beautiful.
But is it theatre was the question that echoed through our group. Well yes I think it is because you are confronted, you do ask questions, you even provide your own dialogue as discoveries are made.
David Harradine the director and his team, especially Ali Beale's design, have created something memorable. I could have done with more direct interaction and a little more drama, not to mention a more palpable sense of weather, but I did find it fascinating and enjoyable if a little anti-climactic too.
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