It is certainly an achievement by The Brighton Laboratory to create such a strong feeling of isolation in its reworking of Albert Camus’ The Outsider.

I cannot have been alone in feeling completely alienated by its debut production, The Sun That Casts No Shadows.

Every buzzword from the manual of contemporary theatre is shoehorned in regardless of necessity. It’s a multimedia, site-specific, promenade performance, and the PR explains the team will use “text, movement, music and technology to respond to Camus’ classic”.

What arrives is a nightmare which feels as if the directors are trapped in a Dreamthinkspeak performance with no training, the exits blocked and the escape route written in Esperanto.

The introduction, with a shooting far away on the beach, is pointlessly in French with no translation (Camus was French; we are not). Next we enter the building in a funeral procession and then come the famous lines of the mother’s death (thus re-jigging the book’s plot).

Extracts from the book are read aloud by different cast members taking it in turns to narrate.

We sit, stand and dodge the young cast who are not yet ready for such an ambitious production. They seem to be either frightened to death or enjoying themselves indulgently while we suffer nowhere in between.

Mersault and Marie, who have the chemistry of flat ale, go to a party and twirl to that most Algerian of styles, techno. A fight outside the Volks feels like a sixth-form drama class warm-up. There are several slow, self-consciously thought-provoking scenes with no emotion.

Stephen Hudson’s pretentious overacting is almost insufferable. Never can a priest have addressed a destitute man in a cell as if he were the Pope talking to St Mark’s Square.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that all the shows are sold out.