Rory Mullarkey’s last major London outing, Saint George And The Dragon at the National Theatre, collapsed into a quagmire generated by its own confusion. His latest succeeds for almost exactly the same reasons. The chaos is the point: the collision of genres and registers, the almost random interruptions, the increasing uncertainty. Even the ensemble playing the live accompaniment (augmenting recordings ranging from Chopin’s Funeral March to some old-skool house music) is contradictory: they are members of a brass band, that most northern and working-class of musical institutions, but a brass band from prosperous Fulham in south-west London.

Alex stands in the town square, watching nothing in particular: dog-walking, ice cream slurping, even his own sudden falling in love, all banalities are portrayed in a deadpan 1990s-TV-cartoon style. Once in a while a discordant note is sounded: a reactionary old man, an explosion... then the sudden misfortunes gather pace and intensity. By halfway through the 100-minute piece, bombs are going off all over the place, refugees from a neighbouring district have arrived, and Alex is remarking, “This has escalated quickly”. A little while later, a civil war is portrayed as a succession of massacres in mid-triumphal boogie while a neon sign overhead proclaims “ATROCITIES!”

It’s ridiculous, insane, entirely unreal. It’s also a profoundly accurate account of the world we live in today: the initial simple sense of reliance on some fixed values and institutions is eroded first sporadically and then systematically, so that we can never again find a remotely firm footing (yes, there’s a seismic scene as well). It doesn’t matter whether or not Helena Lymbery’s big musical number as a useless Prime Minister bewildered by choices of sandwich is a deliberate parody of Theresa May on Brexit; the correspondence is palpable.

Director Sam Pritchard evokes the kind of deadpan wackiness seldom seen this side of German stages, and even then rarely with such skilful use of cognitive dissonance, eliciting in us two opposite responses simultaneously. Restricted-growth actor Francesca Mills wields a machine gun and a tombola drum to similar mind-messing effect. Mullarkey doesn’t know how to bring things to a close, but then, neither do we, these days.

Written for the Financial Times.