With much of the UK evidencing acute political fatigue, a play opening at the very minute when the House of Commons began its “meaningful vote” on Brexit might be expected to find only jaded palates when it concerns nothing but politics – politics and race – both the Holocaust of World War II and contemporary Islamophobia. However, contrary to all expectations, I was enthralled.

This is documentary filmmaker Alexander Bodin Saphir’s first play, and it shows. The four characters tend towards types: Talmudic Abraham, his loving but yielding wife Sara, his rationalist-fundamentalist gentile friend Lars and the latter’s whip-smart daughter Eva. When they spend Hanukah 2001 together in northern Denmark, of course they are going to get snowed in and isolated so that they uncover present truths about each other, possible new revelations about the oddly un-severe Danish Shoah of which Lars is writing a revisionist history, and the eternal conflict of faith and facts. It’s an old-established recipe with little more than a Danish glaze.

Yet it hangs together marvellously. All the disparate elements are tied together in the end (bar those which need to be left hanging), but it feels neither ludicrously complex nor excessively contrived. When Denmark’s 21^st-century drift to the right regarding immigrants is raised, one sees the sledgehammer rise... but it falls without the expected clang, as this issue is swiftly woven into a historical view of national characteristics. Similarly, when the play’s major personal secret is finally brought into the open, it forms a clear parallel with the crucial childhood memory regarding Lars’ Resistance-hero father, but not one that is spelt out; it is enough to leave it on the table.

This is an unapologetically talky, ideas-y play. The ideas, however, are fascinating: I had no notion that over 90% of Denmark’s Jews (including Saphir’s grandfather) were successfully evacuated to Sweden by the Resistance in 1943. The consequent questions raised by Lars about this great good fortune seem at least as plausible as Abraham’s adherence to the twin national and religious narratives, namely that this was both a miracle and a testament to the inherent decency of the Danish character. Matters of nationality bubble through the mix: Sara, born during the period of exile, is Swedish, while Eva has followed Lars’ estranged wife and become a naturalised German. (As a British/Irish dual national flirting with Germanness, I appreciate this complexity.)

The prodigious amount of content is skilfully sold by David Bamber, who underplays Abraham’s banter but deploys his sincerity of belief with quiet fire; Neil McCaul, unafraid to make Lars an often unpleasant person without turning him into a villain; Julia Swift, whose Sara handles Abe as adroitly as perhaps Swift does her husband Bamber in real life; and Dorothea Myer-Bennett, whose Eva is the least rounded character but also in many ways the most identifiable. Director Kate Fahy maintains a naturalistic flow. The dramatic structure is far from original, but its intellectual content is fresh and its emotional journeys beautifully handled in performance. Saphir has done far better than most at digesting a mass of factual material within a fictional framework.

Written for the Financial Times.