Specifically, Rudi is the son of an SS doctor at Auschwitz, a Nazi war criminal now in hiding in Paraguay with his family, who have kept Rudi in the dark about his father’s past which he only discovers as a teenager. Upon this revelation, he flees back to Berlin and builds himself an anonymous new life but the weight of the past and the huge questions of guilt and responsibility hang heavily over him, especially once he finds love with an American Jewish woman.
Whilst much of the play is delivered by Jordan McCurrach’s excellently Rudi as he narrates his way through the complex and confusing emotional world he finds himself in, Moscovitch’s real coup is in thrusting his narration through the fourth wall so that he is constantly asking questions, acknowledging horrors and seeking reassurances of us the audience. Our own reactions are thus interrogated as he tries to second-guess where our sympathies will lie, predicting how we might have responded if we were in his shoes, or even those of his father.