Daniel Kehlmann has been making waves as a novelist and playwright, but this is the first of his stage work to be produced outside the German-speaking lands. It’s a smart, lively chamber piece, deftly staged by Laurence Boswell in one of the few studio theatres that regularly draw national reviewers out of London. Yet its kernel is... well, if I called it characteristically German, I would be inaccurate and glib, but it’s easy to associate with that country’s artistic mindset, even while the play is lampooning just that.

Young playwright Martin Wegner is, thanks to a charitable foundation, engaged in a week’s mentoring under Benjamin Rubin. Rubin wrote a masterpiece decades ago but has since then been what James Joyce called “a praiser of his own past”: arrogant, demanding and generally no-one’s favourite uncle. Wegner’s play, entitled Without A Title (well, quite), offends the conservatism of Rubin, who is distinctly more interested in Frau Wegner. In 80-odd minutes, we follow initial meeting, bust-up and developing aftermath over the course of not quite 48 hours.

Simply by standing on the Ustinov stage, F. Murray Abraham is The Mentor in his own right. As Rubin, he ranges from oily condescension through spiky candour to implausible denial with fluidity and assurance, showing Daniel Weyman as Wegner, Naomi Frederick as wife Gina and Jonathan Cullen as the foundation’s factotum how to change gears with silky smoothness. Weyman, in turn, inhabits Wegner’s mercurial mood shifts and insecurities more dynamically and Cullen is an actor always worth watching; however, I’m not sure Kehlmann has drawn a coherent through line for Gina, and Frederick mostly has to string together a series of moments and motivations which belie what we know of her character.

Several darts are thrown at contemporary German drama and Regietheater (at one point Wegner almost says, “It means whatever you want it to mean”), and at art in general, repeatedly reminding us that it’s always seen through prisms of commerce, fashion or simply who does the washing-up. And that’s the flawed core I mentioned earlier: in the end, it’s art about art, and no matter how sharp, such work will always seem ultimately hermetic and prone to the same kind of solipsism as Rubin himself.

Written for the Financial Times.