And just as he once put on a decent performance as atightropewalker in a circus some 15 years ago, Mr Hagen has learned to keep his footing in parliamentary politics.
The exuberantly composed and furiously performed scenes play out, in bars and streets and beds and bathrooms, at the perilously measured pace of atightropewalker dancing over the abyss, and the three actors lurch and shamble with the vestigial grace of the athletes these commuters once longed to be.