The production would seem to owe more to Beckett than Brecht in that it sets about paring down to a minimum what we like to call the ‘action’ of the play. The audience is treated to a row of four chairs, which austerity is barely relieved by the odd prop – a bottle of stout here, a picture of ‘our Lord’ there. The actors, with hardly a sideways glance, sit facing out front, acting to the back of the auditorium.

The last work of writer and journalist Joseph Roth before he died of alcoholism, The Legend is a painful yet magical autobiographical imagining from this eloquent liberal Jewish writer cast adrift in the late 1930s . . .

I’m always encouraged and delighted when a writer finds some fresh way of getting their ideas across, some novel way to use the empty space and offer the patient audience a new key to somebody else’s world. Alys Metcalf’s new offering is a stride in the right direction . . . The scene is a small riverside jetty where Jo, a writer and recovering cancer patient, is trying to teach herself to fish . . .

Like a newly anointed politician smartened up for public consumption the show has had a makeover since its first iteration at the Wardrobe Theatre, prior to an outing at Edinburgh. Some glitzy shoes and smart designer bag-dresses have allowed the show entrance into polite society. The concept does the rest: what starts as a kind of musical/theatrical joke soon becomes hypnotic. Like any worthy art it creates its own world the exploration of which gives us new insight into our own.