Introducing a junior to a veteran for support has become popular at all levels, from mentorship schemes in education and workplaces to corporations’ creative match-ups, such as the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, in which a genius and a wannabe meet for tutorials.

A loose and satirically exaggerated version of the latter arrangement is the basis for The Mentor, a play by Daniel Kehlmann, a hotly popular young German author that Christopher Hampton has translated into English, as he did with two French wunderkinds, Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller.