Mark Ravenhill has hit upon an arresting dramatic conceit to convey the complex of ideas and emotions stirred to life in East and West Berliners when the wall dividing them was torn down.

In his 70-minute Over There, second play in the Court’s Germany at 60 season, the communist East and relatively democratic West are represented by identical male twins in their early 20s. By chance, the almost look-alike, talented Treadaway twins, Luke and Harry, were available to play Karl, who has lived all his life with his father in East Berlin, and Franz, whose mother escaped with him to the other side when he was just an infant.

It’s not nearly as politically subversive, comic or original a conceit as that dreamed up in Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, where the Anglo-American “special” relationship was depicted as Tony Blair and George Bush’s gay romance. Even so, there is a nice, satirical comedy about the deployment of these twins.

Ravenhill reunites them when young adults and describes their increasingly fraught, love-hate relations from 1988 to 1991: Karl comes to delight in the pleasures of the consumerist West even as marketing-man, Franz, surrenders to disillusion with his pressured job, disappointment over his failed relationship and the rarity of visits from his infant son.

In style and form Ravenhill, who co-directs on a blue and white box-stage with Ramin Gray, revolts against Anglo-Saxon realism and goes for European staging. He opts for dreamy expressionism, touches of Absurd Theatre and an allegoric preface and epilogue set in the Californian heart of capitalism. He could do with Brechtian captions to help us appreciate the play’s time-scale and less infantile symbolism: the shattering of Berlin’s wall is suggested by the collapse of a vertical pile of consumer boxes.

The play’s weakness lies in its relative failure to distinguish between the two twins and show how they have diverged as a result of being brought up in radically different politico-social systems.

Luke Treadaway’s ardent Karl, having failed to persuade Harry’s Franz they should swap passports so he can visit his sick mother in West Berlin, is seduced by the comforts of the West, wears his brother’s smart salesman’s suit and borrows Franz’s professional identity.

In the end, though, Karl rejects the new Berlin, the new Germany and the individualism his brother approves. He hankers for East Berlin, whose summer camping, communal sports facilities and singing contests for thousands of young people in forests he sentimentally adores.

For all the nastiness of late 20th century capitalism, though, Ravenhill never convinced me Karl would prefer East Berlin’s ghastly regime of oppression, surveillance and terror.

Until 21 March (020 7565 5000).