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In Democracy, English writer Michael Frayn focuses on a key period in 20th century German history that's barely 30 years into the past, yet forgotten by most people who were living at the time.
It is the years from 1969 to 1974, when the left-wing government of Willy Brandt briefly held power in a West Germany that had been ruled by right-wing forces since the end of World War II.
Frayn concentrates on the relationship between the charismatic but moody, womanising and hard-drinking Brandt, and a colourless trade unionist, Günter Guillaume, brought into the Social Democratic Party (SPD) hierarchy as a token representative of the people.
Brandt, like other SPD leaders, initially makes Guillaume the butt of jokes, but eventually the dour worker, a refugee from Communist East Germany, wins Brandt's trust and becomes his personal assistant.
Guillaume, however, was a spy for the East Germans and, while the play makes it clear it was unlikely he ever gave them much information that was secret, his eventual arrest placed a shadow over Brandt and contributed to the end of his career as Chancellor.
Frayn paints the deeply flawed Brandt as setting Germany on the path to reunification after its post-World War II division into two states with rival adherences to the West and to the Soviet Union.
While other West German leaders tried to pretend that the East did not exist, Brandt went there and gave it formal recognition, a move the play suggests helped to bring down the Berlin Wall 15 years after Brandt went into the political wilderness.
As well as these matters of personalities and historical issues, Frayn also uses the play to look at the instability often associated with democracy, as political alliances change and help to make or break governments and leaders.
While all this is fascinating, Democracy doesn't completely succeed as a dramatic piece.
Frayn doesn't go too deeply into most of the characters, so that many of the politicians come across more as stereotypes than as real people. Even Brandt, whose unhappy mixture is well portrayed by Philip Quast, doesn't convince as flesh-and-blood.
And Guillaume's duplicity, which is known from the first minutes, is used to comment on people and events as the dull man (played suitably dully by Geoff Kelso) talks and talks, often in the middle of a German ministry scene, to his East German control (Paul Goddard).
So while well-acted by a large all-male cast under the direction of Australian expatriate Michael Blakemore (who also directed the London and New York productions), Democracy ends up as fascinating and flawed as Brandt and with a touch of the dullness of Guillaume.
