THE obituaries might read: "Friends said she was a loner," when talking about the sole woman on-stage in Request Programme, German writer Franz Xaver Kroetz's bleakly funny study of loneliness known in its original German as Wunschkonzert.

“She just kept herself to herself and didn’t bother anyone.”

Following one night in the life of a middle-aged woman who comes home from work to a private place where she can indulge in her personal little rituals while listening to her favourite radio show, Request Programme is a fascinating insight into what goes on behind closed doors. Crucially, except for the radio, not a word is spoken.

“It’s such a special play,” director Hedvig Claesson says, “and so strange. There are no words spoken, but you feel this woman is talking all the time, talking in your head.”

Originally produced in Sweden by Riksteatern, the country’s national touring theatre, Claesson’s production toured about 60 real-life apartments there before doing the same at the Nordwind Festival in Berlin.

In Edinburgh, she hopes to recapture that sense of up-close-and-personal intimacy by playing it in the ornate, intimate surroundings of the Inlingual language school in the city’s west end.

Swedish actress Cecilia Nilsson says such close proximity to the audience leaves her necessarily exposed. “There is no place to hide,” she says. “It’s fascinating to play her, because it’s so different from playing alongside other characters.

“Because I’m on my own, I have to fight giving too much of a performance, because you’re always wanting to do something, when this play is in fact almost like a meditation.”

Nilsson first heard about Request Programme in the 1970s, and although her sister saw a production of it in Stockholm in 1975, she didn’t see it until 1981.

“At the time it made me very angry,” she says. “Why? I’m not sure, but it deals with matters that are very existential. This woman is a person who’s developed a few special habits. She lives a very secluded life and has isolated herself from the world. She doesn’t have a computer and doesn’t socialise at all. She’s gone into her own little world and has very strong depression. She’s become afraid of life, but she’s also very much like you or me. All these feelings she has inside her.”

Request Programme received its British premiere in Edinburgh in 1974 at the Traverse Theatre, then still in its old Grassmarket home, in a production featuring veteran Scottish actress Kay Gallie. The play tapped into a form of super-realism that was Kroetz’s raison d’etre of short scenes depicting seemingly mundane and often economically disenfranchised lives barely getting by.

The play reappeared at the Traverse in 1986 in a new production featuring Eileen Nicholas.

Request Programme was subsequently produced in New York and other countries, including a version of the play by American Lee Breuer’s Mabou Mines theatre company.

Other Kroetz plays seen in Scotland include Home Worker, again at the Traverse in 1974, a small production of Stallerhoff, and, more recently at the Citizens in Glasgow, a production of Tom Fool that transferred to London with Liam Brennan and Meg Fraser in the cast.

Kroetz’s work first started appearing in the UK at a time when he and other German writers, including Manfred Karge, whose solo piece Man To Man was performed powerfully by Tilda Swinton at the Traverse in 1987, were coming to the fore.

Kroetz’s work in particular, which so often dealt with characters unused to having a voice, may well have been a subconscious influence on Scottish writers such as David Harrower, whose spare use of language in his debut play, Knives in Hens, isn’t so far removed from Kroetz.

Despite the obvious practical advantages of doing a one-person play without words, allowing it to travel abroad easier, for such a serious piece of contemporary playwriting to receive such attention remains rare, especially after almost 40 years when the vogue for German writers of Kroetz’s post-1968 generation appears to have passed.

Especially considering the fact that 65-year-old Kroetz, who originally trained as an actor and became a celebrity in the late 1980s after playing a corrupt gossip columnist in a glossy TV soap opera, gave up playwriting in 2006, declaring it a spent force.

Rather than make it a 1970s period piece, Claesson’s take on Request Programme is made even more pertinent by setting the piece in the here and now of things, intimations of obsessive compulsive disorder and all.

“The play talks about loneliness in a way that you can really feel,”

Claesson says. “I really love all of this woman’s little rituals, the small things that are funny, and which we all do and become obsessed by. On one level they’re funny, but they also speak so much about how we’re all alone.”

Request Programme, Pleasance@Inlingual School, August 4-27, 7.30-8.40pm weekdays, 4-5.10pm and 6-7.10pm Saturdays and Sundays. Visit www.pleasance.co.uk.