Lucie Pohl: Hi, Hitler

"She's Bertolt Brecht's niece! Bertolt Brecht's niece!" exclaimed one journalist on Twitter of Lucie Pohl. Yes, it's a head-get-around moment, but the fact theatre runs in the Pohl blood is clear from the off.

Born in Germany to playwright and actor Klaus Pohl and Romanian singer Sandra Weigl, the "Pohl Family Circus", as she describes it, was a place where "nothing was worthwhile if it wasn't dramatic". This is a land where excess—in terms of emotions and alcohol intake, in the case of her father—is part of the daily routine, and where crying is done vaingloriously in front of a mirror.

Given this charged background, Pohl seems to have come out quite well-adjusted. Perhaps this owes something to her efforts to indulge in the bliss of the domestic stability of others, while distancing herself from her chaotic family unit. She achieves true distance when she goes back to Germany to study drama, having left with her family for a new life in New York when she was eight.

Things don't run smoothly and she can't completely escape getting caught up in her family, in the shape of her aunt's boyfriend. In her efforts to extricate herself from that inevitably doomed circumstance she finds that running away from the family circus has jeopardised her identity in terms of where she calls home.

It's an interesting hour, through which the 31-year-old moves and narrates with gymnastic dexterity. You're left intrigued—wondering among other things, why the show isn't in the theatre section—if not spellbound.