Neil Bartlett's The Maids isn't the only site-specific production taking place at the Old Ship Hotel this Brighton Festival.

A little-known company called Theatre In Translation has also spotted the dramatic potential of the city's oldest working hotel and tonight they'll be using the Grisham suite and some of its bedrooms to premiere their 40-minute play, Five Years Of Happiness.

What makes this piece truly innovative, however, is the fact the audience will be in an entirely different venue altogether.

A year in the making, Theatre In Translation's major debut is equally inspired by Cocteau's The Human Voice, a one-sided telephone conversation in which a woman tries to salvage her love affair, and Hitchcock's Rear Window, in which a wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbours from his apartment window.

The story is of a woman who, on the fifth anniversary of a passionate affair, waits for her lover, who has promised to leave his wife. Alone in the hotel room, she makes phone calls and leaves messages but no one ever picks up.

From their vantage point across the street in the Sussex Arts Club, the audience watch the woman's tragedy unfold through the windows of the Old Ship Hotel. She is played by three actresses who all wear the same Fifties pink dress.

"We came up with the archetypal idea of a woman calling her lover, and wanted to put it in a contemporary context," says Australian Jodee Mundy, who formed the multinational company with Swedish Anne Jonsson. "We thought about using the internet and webcam. Then we realised we could actually put the audience in a different building and have her call them, so they can listen in on her private messages. There are five windows used in the hotel and we cut between them as you would in a film."

Dealing with themes of intimacy, voyeurism and communication, Five Years Of Happiness makes use of a technique called corporeal mime in order to convey what is happening from across the street - its originator, Etienne Decroux, described it as "making visible the invisible".

"It's about speaking through your body," says Mundy, who trained with Jonsson for four years at the Ecole De Mime Corporeal Dramatique. "The actors are like moving statues, they know how to sculpture their own bodies. They use really stylised gestures and movements in order for the audience to understand what's going on."

Mundy hopes interest in the show will grow during its run as performances catch the eye of passers-by in the street. "People will look up and wonder what the woman in the window is saying," she says. Of course, the only way to find out is to buy a ticket.

  • 8pm & 9.30pm tonight, times vary, £12/£10, 01273 709709
  • Theatre In Translation are running two corporeal mime workshops on May 25 and May 27 at Alive Health, Castle Stree, Brighton between noon-4pm (call 01273 709709)