3 Winters at the National Theatre, London SE1

5/5

Tena Stivicic “was born in Yugoslavia but woke up in Croatia,” according to novelist Dubravka Ugresic and 3 Winters is a painfully honest, insightful and deeply intelligent stab at reconciling this personal and historic fissure.

Her play is in many ways an allegory of eastern Europe’s political upheaval a quarter of a century ago.

It offers a rare insight into political transformations, whose balance sheets show great spiritual loss for the many balanced against material gain for the few.

3 Winters begins in Zagreb, 1945, where Rose King (Jo Herbert), a Croatian communist partisan, is offered a choice of flats from the dozens nationalised after being abandoned by fleeing nazi collaborators. Intriguingly, she selects one in the posh area of town.

She moves in with her tailor husband Alexander (Alex Price), a communist forcibly recruited during the nazi occupation into the Croat police, their baby daughter Masha and her mother Monika (Josie Walker). It soon transpires that Monika worked at the house before WWII as a maid for a rich family who threw her out when she got pregnant.

All except Rose find that the idea of class society is no longer difficult to get used to, particularly as the “class-enemy” daughter of the former owner Karolina turns up disorientated after being institutionalised for refusing to join her father’s escape to Argentina. The Kings rally to protect her.

Fast forward to 1990. Rosa is dead and her daughter Masha now lives in the flat with teacher husband Vlado Kos (Adrian Rawlins), daughters Lucia (Charlotte Beaumont), Alisa (Bebe Saunders) and her father Alexander.

Paying a visit is her sister Dunya (Lucy Black) who lives in Germany, inexplicably with an anti-communist, violent husband Karl (Daniel Flynn). Karolina (Susan Engel), now an adopted member of the family, supplies acerbic if good-hearted comment to the familial and political banter. Their left-wing convictions remain intact.

Yet they dread the prospect of Yugoslavia’s collapse as TV brings news of a break-up of the League of Communist Parties at their congress. Karl, spitting out revanchist and ultra-nationalist vitriol, further fuels the sense of foreboding.

The action then shifts to 2011 where in the same flat — now in Croatia — the family prepares for the wedding of Lucie (Sophie Rundle). They, along with Alisa (Jodie McNee) who now lives and studies in England, face the demons of a society that has no use for their principles. Hardly surprising, given the fact that years earlier the Ministry of Culture instructed libraries to clear all texts deemed left-wing.

They were subsequently burned, among them plays by Shakespeare.

In a telling sign of the times, Alisa finds out that Lucie and her husband-to-be started evicting tenants in order to buy the house on the cheap. Revulsion collides head on with Lucie’s self-serving but pragmatic argument of saving the aged and impoverished Masha and Vlado from eviction.

The play ends with an allegoric, ghostly dance in semi-darkness where Lucia remains the only brightly-lit but lonely figure.

Stivicic’s writing is engrossing to the last detail and she gives great poignancy to ordinary conversation, allowing it to articulate, with remarkable clarity, the complex political transformations and their devastating effects on individuals.

In that, she is uncompromisingly akin to Brecht, while employing Chekhovian observation of behaviour and emotions.

Howard Davies’s direction has evidently inspired an ensemble performance of exquisite harmony and utter believability where singling out one performance would do injustice to all.

Runs until February 3.