The starting point is the town of Güllen (translated this means ‘Sewer’), somewhere in Germany in 1954-56. Güllen is a rundown, penniless town; all the factories are closed and the townspeople are starving and literally shoeless. In the world of the play, things are so desperate that the people are willing to do anything to change their miserable lives.

To find a parallel to this, I looked back to the Germany of 1923 and the days of hyperinflation, a time when inflation was at five thousand percent. There was one man who dreamed of retiring and, on the day of his retirement, after paying into a company pension for twenty years, he decided to cash it in. He went out and spent the lot on one loaf of bread. Another example was how if you bought a bottle of wine in the evening, by the next morning the empty bottle would be worth more money than the full one the day before. This was a country in which a whole life spent saving became worthless overnight, never to be recovered; where comfortably well-off people were made destitute and starving in a heartbeat.

We could then start to understand what can drive human beings to believe in anyone or anything that claims to be able to help them out of this life of absolute misery, or how, when offered the opportunity of credit and loans on the promise of vast amounts of money, they – or you – may well find it impossible to refuse.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt never mentions the Second World War directly but the events of its darkest periods are always underlying the scenes and the actions of the characters. Claire’s offer, and her condition, may be unthinkable in our lives but to the people of Gullen it would seem heaven-sent. The warning is unmissable.

Mark Fitzgerald