Lette is hideous. In fact, with horrible aptness, considering that he works for a company that has just developed a revolutionary new socket fixture, he is plug-ugly. That’s the opinion of his boss, Scheffler, who, thanks to Lette’s off-putting looks, asks his assistant, Karlmann, to present Lette’s invention to the business community. It’s also the view of his wife, Fanny, who admits that while she thinks him a “beautiful human being” she finds him physically repellent. So Lette, perturbed by these revelations, submits to the surgeon’s knife. He emerges from his bandages irresistibly beautiful – but at what cost?

This 55-minute scalpel-slash of a play by the German writer Marius von Mayenburg, briskly translated by Maja Zade, is a viciously comic assault on the warped values of pop-culture-fed modern society. Appearance is everything, and surgery is a matter of almost thoughtless choice in the greedy pursuit of contentment – “if it makes you happy”, as Lette’s wife casually puts it. With everyone assigned a role – spouse, boss, worker – there’s little room for honesty or individuality; especially when Lette’s new face become the visage du jour, and the streets fill up with lookalikes, freshly unpeeled from their bandages.

It’s a distorted but frighteningly sharp mirror image of our celebrity and youth-obsessed world. Aspiration to a commercially prescribed notion of beauty has begun to obliterate identity, and Nicole Kidman’s nose is a cosmetic-surgery commodity.

Lette is a kind of 21st-century Elephant Man, exploited by his employer, his surgeon and by the men and women who are suddenly wildly keen to have sex with him. All von Mayenburg’s characters aside from Lette are called Fanny, Scheffler or Karlmann, emphasising the blurring of identities. The actors glide fluidly between roles, so that Lette’s wife Fanny is swiftly transformed into a septuagenarian, also called Fanny, whose extensive surgery permits her to present herself as a youthful vamp.

Ramin Gray’s stripped-back production, in Jeremy Herbert’s scruffy rehearsal room-style setting, emphasises the work’s preoccupation with role-playing, and it is acted with razor wit by Amanda Drew, Michael Gould, Mark Lockyer and Frank McCusker. Perversely, the whole is somewhat bloodless – a swift stab from a chilly blade when a lengthier dissection would have yielded more political and dramatic interest. But, brief as it is, it’s coolly clever and nastily arresting.

— Box office: 020-7565 5000

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