Several years ago the film-maker and social critic Adam Curtis collaborated with immersive theatre company Punchdrunk on a live/installation/video piece, It Felt Like A Kiss. The result was an uncertain hotchpotch. Mike Bartlett’s latest play is much closer to the spirit and argument of Curtis, particularly the latter’s notions that political and corporate powers deliberately confuse the rest of us in order to forestall coherent protest.

Bartlett’s play begins in a hotel room, apparently in Moscow. A man is being erratically wooed to ally himself with the organisation represented by an eccentric woman. No real-life names are used, but to all intents and purposes this is a version of Wikileaks attempting to recruit Edward Snowden on an ongoing basis after his sensational revelations. Jack Farthing as Andrew (not Edward) is for the most part required to be passive, or ultimately acquiescent; here, it is Caoilfhionn Dunne who gets to riff, bounce and generally mess with his head, as if Tigger had become a KGB interrogator. It is a performance that deserves to make Dunne’s reputation.

Eventually, though, she needs a break, and is succeeded by the lanky, understated John Mackay, who insists that he is the real representative of this quasi-Wiki outfit, and ratchets up Andrew’s paranoia both about possible attempts on his life and about what is and is not real and trustworthy. Then Dunne’s woman returns, and finally they both work on him as a double-act, eroding the last vestiges of his certainty even in such a basic concept as trust.

At this point, James Macdonald’s customary careful, precise direction is entirely and deliberately eclipsed by the stage itself, as the shifts in Andrew’s perspective are made breathtakingly literal. This must be the only occasion in my reviewing career when I have found myself observing anti-spoiler conventions concerning the set design. Suffice it to say that even by the exuberantly inventive standards of Miriam Buether this is a doozy. Just as the wordiness about who is really who and why, in either a particular or a general sense, threatens to grow stultifying, we are given an almighty jolt to plunge us into the very bewilderment (and final capitulation) that Bartlett is anatomising. Quite literally off the wall.

Written for the Financial Times.