Orange Tree Theatre

★★★★✩

Though German writer Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play is set entirely inside the warmth of a large, well-to-do bohemian house with book-lined walls and a piano, winter doesn’t get more much more chilling than this.

The home belongs to bickering couple Albert and Bettina. Though it is located somewhere in snowy Europe, according to the play’s text, it makes much more sense to think of this as Germany.

Not that this Actors Touring Company and Orange Tree Theatre co-production directed by Ramin Gray bothers to depict the place.

Taking its cue from Schimmelpfennig’s instruction that “lines in addition to the dialogues” are spoken, Lizzie Clachlan’s casual design consists of little more than a few folding tables on which the detritus of a meeting — half drunk bottles of water, scripts — are strewn across the surfaces.

For the viewer, it’s like gatecrashing a rehearsal. For the actors, it must be like being half in and half out of a play.

They perform not just the characters, but themselves too until the duality is overwhelmed by the play’s sinister and deeply scary logic.

It’s a boozy Christmas Eve and Bettina’s mother, Corinna is staying for longer than anticipated. This is a source of some consternation for Albert and considerably more than just some for Bettina. But it is with the arrival of Corinna’s new male friend, Rudolph, a friendship forged on a train delayed by snow, that familial discontent is replaced with something much more unsettling.

Now, it may be that I should insert a spoiler alert here. For much relies on the emerging identity of Rudolph, who is charm itself. But I’m guessing that most JC readers will immediately have the same suspicions about Rudolph as does Albert, the play’s Jewish character.

They are sparked by clues. Rudolph was born in Paraguay; he plays Bach on the piano; he extols the virtues of Wagner; he admires Chopin despite the composer’s Polish nationality and declares that there are no Jewish or Catholic composers of note.

He also has a fondness for old fashioned terms and values, such as “chivalry” and prefers to call Corinna by the “Old High German” name of Gudrun. So, do the math.

If you do, the world view later declared with evangelical zeal by Rudolph as the wine warms everyone’s blood, will come as little surprise.

As wary, stressed Albert and the charismatic Rudolph, Dominic Rowan and Nicholas Le Prevost lead a dance of undeclared mutual contempt, for the most part contained by the etiquette between host and guest.

Schimmelpfennig rather over-eggs Albert’s role as the only one present inured to his guest’s charms. His Albert is a writer of Holocaust literature and his current book is called Christmas at Auschwitz.

But where this warning of the far right’s return convinces is with the way in which Rudolph pedals his ideas in seemingly blameless euphemisms. They evoke nothing more offensive than a certain kind of art or a particular Nordic kind of ritual. But Albert knows what they actually mean — that the world would be much better off if everyone not like Rudolph were put to death. Everyone like Albert.