Marius von Mayenburg is getting madder. There has always been a current of humour in his dramatic indictments of society, even when they were as bleak as his best-known to British audiences, The Ugly One. Now, however, as a director, he is expanding that current to Amazonian widths. And it’s working. His production of his latest play, A Piece Of Plastic, premièring at his Berlin base of operations as part of the Schaubühne’s annual International Festival of New Drama (F.I.N.D.), peaks with an extravagant spaghetti fight. (The pasta sticks to the wall, so we know it’s properly cooked.)

The noodle showdown is just one of several ridiculous stunts pulled by pretentious artist Serge Haulupa; others include a compressed-air-driven bagpipe aria and a performance piece entitled The Fridge Is Empty. The fridge in question belongs to fashionable middle-class couple Michael and Ulrike; she is Haulupa’s P.A., he is a doctor, and their boundless capacity for inadvertent condescension is brought out when they engage Jessica Schmitt as cleaner and housekeeper. They apologise for leaving money around the flat, lest she think they are testing her honesty; they offer her clothes destined for charity donation; every remark they make to try to avoid giving one impression creates its equally pernicious mirror image.

Sebastian Schwarz has a high old time as Haulupa; his provocations are as absurd as the couple’s conventionality which he claims to be critiquing, but amidst it all is a kernel of awkward truth. Jenny König as Jessica has to keep a poker face through over two hours of this, and also to clean up prodigious amounts of assorted gunk; somehow, she succeeds in making both a character and a commentary out of it. Robert Beyer, Marie Burchard and Laurenz Laufenberg as their pubescent son are prisoners of their own self-image; when Michael proposes to work in Guinea for Médecins sans Frontières, Ulrike howls at him, “But you’ve got borders all over the place!” Von Mayenburg suspends the apartment’s kitchen on steel cables, uses Haulupa-esque video projections and sends Michael and Vincent on a chase through the audience, constantly reminding us that the theatrical set-up is as artificial as the family’s liberal consciousness: a piece of plastic.
  
Written for the Financial Times.