The New World Order, Brighton Town Hall, until May 19

6:00am Wednesday 9th May 2007

The team behind The New World Order, a site-specific performance of Pinter's political shorts, have been visiting Brighton Town Hall for more than a year now.

But up until recently they were still finding new corridors, rooms and remote passageways in which to set their scenes. Some of the actors are still getting lost.

"I think the audience will get completely disorientated," says Richard Hahlo, one of the eight-strong Brighton cast. "I've watched Pinter plays many times in the West End and at the National Theatre, and they're always very beautifully performed and designed. This, in a way, is like Pinter unplugged. The set is the building, with just a little lighting and sound."

Less well known than his full-length plays such as The Caretaker and The Birthday Party, Pinter's later, political pieces have nevertheless enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the wake of the Iraq war. Here five of the short, high-impact vignettes are performed in promenade, from high up in the lofty council chambers, through the corridors of power and down into the subterranean police cells which lie beneath Brighton Town Hall.

"Some of the plays are very short - only three pages long," explains Hahlo, "so we didn't think it would make much sense to sit down and watch them, one after the other, in a conventional theatre. What we've done is to imagine the plays all exist in the same world, and to connect them with fragments of Pinter's poem's and prose writing.

"It's all quite fluid. The audience make their journey through the building and the plays carry on around them."

In The New World Order, Pinter's meditation on the Gulf War, two torturers set to work on a prisoner. One For The Road, the 1984 outcry against actions in Nicaragua in which Pinter himself appeared in 2001, imagines the abuse and interrogation of a family in a totalitarian state.

Inspired by Turkey's treatment of the Kurds, the 1988 play Mountain Language depicts a country where an ethnic minority is banned from speaking its native tongue. Also included are Precisely and Dialogue For Three.

"It's Pinter's view of a very extreme government state," says Hahlo of the collected works, "and, what if that was happening on our doorstep?

"He's looking at the abuse of power, and when politics and power combine to repress individual freedoms. All the plays have that connection with the liberty of the individual versus the power of the state."

"Here you're right up close to it, and perhaps you might in some way feel complicit. I think it'll be quite a strong experience for people."

• For review, see Friday's The Argus or visit www.theargus.co.uk/festival
• 7pm & 9.30pm, £12.50, 01273 709709

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