’Twas, er, the night before the night before Christmas, and all through the fashionable Berlin apartment not a creature was stirring without inadvertently revealing several things at once. Not self-regarding but neurotic writer Albert nor his intelligent but undervalued wife Bettina, whose home it is; nor Bettina’s too-demonstrative mother Corinna, the classic semi-welcome holiday guest; nor Bettina’s old friend, artist Konrad, carrying a furtive torch for her. And certainly not the well-groomed, polite Rudolph, who Corinna met on the train and has unilaterally invited to join the… ahem … fun.

Roland Schimmelpfennig uses the template of a traditional form of comedy-drama in order to, just as traditionally, lay bare the insecurities and hypocrisies of the decorous middle classes. A twist of originality is added by having the characters reveal themselves not simply through dialogue but also through reciting stage directions about themselves and each other. (This appears to be part of the authorial concept rather than an element added by director Jan Bosse in this German-language première.) This discreet underlining and undermining can propel the action even more than the dialogue and actions “proper”. All that happens superficially is that over the course of the evening several bottles of wine are consumed and an oversized plastic Christmas tree is decorated. The directions provide the missing links in the chain which drags Felix Goeser’s Albert from dignified scholar to a gibbering, pill-popping wreck, or nudges Judith Hoffmann’s Bettina into the arms of Edgar Eckert’s Konrad.

German audiences in particular, however, need little help reading between the lines of Bernd Stempel’s Rudolph. Little by little his fondness for old-fashioned manners and aesthetics reveals a taste for echt-German composers, an adherence to ideas about “degenerate” art and various other hints at the most unpleasant chapter of the country’s past. By the time he – still outwardly polite in tone – calls Albert a “filthy Jew”, we no longer know whether this is Albert’s nightmare, the literal truth or a distillation thereof. It is all done with skill and deliberation, but you can’t shake the feeling that there’ll be another such piece along soon, as regularly as Christmas or the solstice festival.

Written for the Financial Times.