The insoluble mysteries of art and existence are evoked in Michael Frayn’s new play. As in the writer’s recent works Copenhagen and Democracy, the point of lift-off is located in real life; as in 1982’s Noises Off and 1990’s Look Look, the treatment is metatheatrical.

The subject is Max Reinhardt, the innovative Jewish impresario who co-founded the Salzburg Festival and in 1920 presented there, for the first time, his production of Hofmannsthal’s version of the medieval morality play Everyman.

Afterlife, directed with cool precision by Michael Blakemore, is a playful exploration of the ways in which language, faith and art express and shape our world. It presents not merely a notion of art reflecting life, but multiple mirrors reflecting back and forth an infinity of possibilities, bright, shining surfaces between which words and actions fly faster than light. Frayn’s intellectual preoccupations tend to crowd out immediacy, but the experience still dazzles. On Peter Davison’s monolithic, smoothly gliding pillared set, at once elegant and deliberately artificial, layers of dramatic representation bleed into one another.

Roger Allam’s engaging Reinhardt is an erratic dynamo whose dream is to erase the boundaries between theatre and life. His production of Everyman sees an ordinary individual summoned by Death to face God’s judgment, a fate from which Everyman’s bounteous wealth and social connections cannot defend him. The action of Everyman elides with the triumphs and vicissitudes of the life of Reinhardt, who has escaped the Viennese slums of his boyhood to become part lionised cultural god, part imposter inhabiting a gilded baroque world that proves fragile when Nazism drives him into exile.

In order to raise money – an enabling commodity Allam’s defiantly unworldly Reinhardt will not attempt to comprehend – the impresario stages elaborate choreographed parties where he can seek patronage from the rich and powerful, and which become, with the arrival of Death’s skeletal hooded form, a danse macabre. Death’s appearance is the physicalisation of the invisible force propelling us all to the inevitable ultimate destination of ceasing to be. The Anschluss is enforced as though the border between Germany and Austria had never existed; Nazi rallies are as carefully stage-managed as Reinhardt’s productions.

Frayn’s erudition sparkles and there’s a buoyant sense of fun in Blakemore’s production to match its braininess. The writing is unashamedly contrived – but artifice is part of its point. Art, the play seems to argue, aims like Frayn’s Reinhardt to reach towards perfect truth. It is an impossible goal, but the effort to reach it is, like humanity’s endless desire to understand itself, the stuff of our disorderly lives. Frayn could have made the journey more emotionally engaging; but he makes a stimulating travelling companion.

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