With its set changes resembling forensic crime-scene reconstructions — lots of plastic sheeting and icy fluorescent light — Katie Mitchell’s production adds up to a meticulous anatomy of Ferdinand Bruckner’s startlingly modern 1926 play. In a boarding house in 1923 Vienna, a group of Freud-saturated Austrian medical students spend a lot of time diagnosing each other’s malaises, casually inflicting emotional wounds and lounging about in silk pyjamas. When they’re not back-stabbing or drinking, they’re bed-hopping. The piece is, among other things, a kind of psychological thriller: who will make it to adulthood? Bruckner’s play, here in a new version by Martin Crimp, could easily entomb us in gloom: it implies that mankind’s natural state is destructive, and many of its youthful characters are remarkably, maddeningly dislikeable. But Mitchell provides a close examination of the psychological and societal forces driving this fatalistically resigned interwar generation, and the performances are slyly seductive. Student navel-gazing has rarely been so absorbing.

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