When David Hare’s play about the birth of Glyndebourne opera house opened at Hampstead in autumn 2015, it drew polite but slightly flummoxed reviews for its own polite portrayal of... what, exactly? Englishness, was the general consensus: a particular paternalistic, proprietorial approach towards society and art alike, even though the owner of the Sussex country house, John Christie, established its musical pedigree largely through engaging a trio of Germans: conductor Fritz Busch, director Carl Ebert and manager Rudolf Bing. All had fled the Nazi régime, whose blatant enormities as early as 1934 the Wagnerphile Christie found it immensely difficult to accept.

In the interim between that première and this West End transfer of Jeremy Herrin’s production, political events have cast British, and particularly English, identity and its relationship with continental Europe into an altogether more vexed context. It would be easy to interpret much of the play in this light, but no more satisfying. Given the lead time from commissioning to original staging, it is unlikely to have been a conscious thematic preoccupation of the playwright’s. But what, then?

Hare’s dramas are seldom action-packed, but this one is less so than most. It consists almost entirely of discussions among the Germans, Christie and his wife Audrey Mildmay, the “moderate soprano” of the title (I’m unable to explain this fully, as on press night Roger Allam as Christie dried on the crucial line). Art, its purpose and ownership, its relation to social and national identity, are debated time and time again, but never to any appreciable conclusion.

Only Herrin’s sensitive direction and a top-notch cast led by Allam as Christie and Nancy Carroll as his wife, with Paul Jesson and Anthony Calf as the senior Germans, prevents all the talking from seeming both uncertain and pointless. As it is, we end up taking the decision to credit Hare with a paradoxical approach because only thus can we justify to ourselves the entire exercise. At least the onstage arguments in favour of premium pricing haven’t been implemented here, but nevertheless the dramatic tone of the piece threatens to make it attractive principally as an entertainment for the demographic groups being (possibly, implicitly) satirised.

Written for the Financial Times.