In one episode of The River Cottage Treatment (please bear with me), Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall took a party of ignorant fast-food eaters to visit a slaughterhouse.

To break them in gently, the tour was conducted in reverse. In the first room they came to, they saw the carcasses of lambs being skinned. In the next, they saw the still fleecy bodies strung up on hooks. Eventually, they came to a room in which they witnessed the animals' throats being slit.

The participants could opt out at any point but most saw it through to the grisly beginnings. Visibly disturbed, they chose to enter the next room out of a mixture, you assumed, of sick fascination and moral compulsion. In a sense it was site-specific, promenade theatre at its most macabre.

I think this is what is being attempted in this homegrown production of five of Pinter's political shorts, in which military guards escort us from the council chambers, where the violence is all linguistic, down to the subterranean police cells, where minds and bodies are broken.

With fragments of drama scattered throughout, the town hall has been reconceived as a sort of anatomy of torture, in which all who tread its corridors are complicit.

Often we are made to listen to the issuing shouts and sobs, for instance, before we enter a room.

Unfortunately, the audience are about as engaged as a bunch of slow-moving sheep and, apart from the woman who refuses to follow one of the guard's instructions on the grounds that "this is a charade - your trouble is, reality is so much more believable", placid smiles seem to be the order of the day.

It is so acutely unaffecting, in fact, that while we listen to a woman being very possibly raped in the next room, another audience member feels comfortable enough to unwrap a double pack of Green & Blacks chocolate.

It should be said the audience have a responsibility here, too, and some people can be bloody rude. But can we really be expected to take an interrogation scene seriously when the space has been dressed with bloody fingerprints, latex gloves and a copy of the Daily Mail?

Much of the acting is excellent and subtle. Hugh Ross, as the chilling chief of secret police, reminds me of a sort of inverse Victor Meldrew, all surface tranquility and inner rage, with cold blue eyes that fail to twinkle when he smiles.

It is the direction which is heavy handed and yet - the production's major let down - fails to seize control of the space.

But I can't help thinking most of the fault lies with Pinter, who rehashes his point about the abuse of power and the repression of individual freedom to no artistic gain.

Here the subtle psychology for which Pinter is famed is all deployed against the prisoners, never present in the torturers. As Ross's character declares in room two, "I love death!"

Beforehand, outside the town hall, two polite middle-aged women handed out leaflets about Omar Deghayes. "Are you here for the play?" they asked. "Then you may be interested in this." For the first and last time tonight, I was moved.

  • SOLD OUT, call 01273 709709