This decade’s (re)opening in its latest incarnation of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Other Place venue is intended consciously to plug into the spirit of radicalism of TOP’s first director, Buzz Goodbody, in the 1970s. Unfortunately, perhaps self-consciously would be a better adverb. TOP has largely been restricted to periodic “Mischief” mini-festivals, presenting work which often toils to be provocative, as with the latest double-bill.

#WeAreArrested is an adaptation from Can Dündar’s account of his imprisonment without trial in Turkey for alleged espionage in printing, as editor of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, details of his government’s illegal and secret activities. Day Of The Living recounts the disappearance in 2014 (and reminds us that in parts of Latin America “disappear” is still a transitive verb) of over 40 Mexican teaching students who had the misfortune to travel on a bus used for transporting drugs, and the extent to which local and even national police and politicians ignored this out of fear of, or even collaboration with, the narcos.

The two pieces are radically different in style. Co-adapter Sophie Ivatts’ production of #WeAreArrested is largely unadorned first-person testimony. Peter Hamilton Dyer recounts Can’s experiences on a stage bare save for a series of tables into which are cut phrases from (we infer) the paper’s coverage; on his first imprisonment, the small square formed by these tabletops becomes his cell. A second actor plays all the female supporting characters, a third (almost) all the male, while a fourth prowls the back of the in-the-round space announcing scene titles like a kind of theatrical sniper. Day Of The Living blends testimony, mythology, overwrought mask-work and pointed musical performance from its company of six in a style which publicity material calls “anarchic” but might equally be called a bit of a mess.

The message seems not so much to be that these events are abominable, but that we are nobly and self-congratulatorily aware of them. I yield to none in my love of the Buffalo Springfield’s 1960s protest anthem “For What It’s Worth” (“Stop, hey, what’s that sound...”), but all too often now it’s used as a lazy shorthand rather than an actual embodiment of resistance. It is the play-out music on #WeAreArrested.

Written for the Financial Times.