Here’s a comment you don’t see or hear very often: “The German production was more naturalistic.” But not much more.  When I reviewed Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Wintersonnenwende (Winter Solstice) in Berlin in 2015, the set was a vague simulacrum of the fashionable middle-class apartment in which Albert and Bettina live and are about to, er, “celebrate” Christmas with his best friend who loves her, as well as her mother and, to everyone’s surprise, her new friend with some very old opinions.

Ramin Gray’s production for the Orange Tree and Actors Touring Company is, in Lizzie Clachan’s design, set more or less as if it were a read-through: folding tables, office chairs, assorted nibbles and stationery standing in for whatever props are called for – Tic-Tacs become the pills Albert pops with increasing intensity, and the precious bauble for the Christmas tree is a clementine. In fact, I think this approach (it is Gray’s third Schimmelpfennig production) jells more closely with the play’s own strategy. As well as their dialogue, the actors deliver stage directions and narrative comments; this keeps us slightly distanced from the events (such as they are) and more focused on personalities and conduct.

In general terms, the playwright is indicting the thinness of the veneer of contemporary liberalism, and in particular its inability to deal with extremism: whether “good” intolerance is exercised against “bad” intolerance, or whether hatred is allowed to conquer and quash permissiveness, it has won either way. Here, the urbane Rudolph knows exactly how far he can push matters at any moment. Nicholas Le Prevost is a master of suave upsets: at one point, mishearing a remark, he questions, “’My Struggle’ [i.e. Mein Kampf]?” while pausing with one arm (albeit his left) upraised perilously like a Nazi salute.

Barely a year ago, I breezed that there would always be another such play along in a while; in the interim, the world has slid so far and so fast that warnings like this simply cannot be given too often or too trenchantly. Indeed, ultimately Gray’s production does not go far enough: it fails to ramp up the intensity over the evening so that, by the end, Dominic Rowan’s Albert is unable to distinguish his pill- and alcohol-driven frenzy from an equally pernicious reality.

Written for the Financial Times.