Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, the play by Tiago Rodrigues, has opened at the National Theatre in London — and the British press-night audience responded with nervous laughter, a chorus of coughs and a few loud whistles where European houses have produced screeching protests and angry walkouts.

The production has incensed audiences across Europe during its run, according to the Guardian's review. The flashpoint is a single character's hellfire rightwing invective, delivered on stage by Romeu Costa, who plays a far-right politician and kidnap victim.

The speech runs half an hour. It takes in, by the review's account, everything from the scourge of minorities to that of elites, homosexuals and the far-left. Costa's character delivers what the reviewer describes as "a masterclass in rightwing rabble-rousing, with its appropriation of the word 'freedom'."

What does it say about an audience who, while watching a character make a speech that has sparked screeching protests and angry walkouts across Europe, sits politely listening until the end? That question sits at the centre of the Guardian's assessment of the British premiere.

The booing does come at the National Theatre. But it arrives only after Costa has finished the monologue — a delayed reaction that contrasts sharply with the interruptions the play has provoked elsewhere on the continent.

The reviewer's verdict on the play itself is mixed. Rodrigues's combination of boredom and shocks, the review argues, ultimately feels confusing. The piece provoked fury abroad; in the UK, the opening-night response suggested a audience more discomfited than enraged — shifting in their seats, coughing, laughing at moments the play may not have intended as comedy.

The contrast raises a question that will follow the production through its London run: whether a work calibrated to detonate in continental theatres can generate the same charge before a British audience, or whether its shocks, delivered to polite silence and nervous titters, land differently — and more faintly — in London.