Theatregoers can normally expect to be greeted by a smiling usher and a glass of chilled wine.

But audience members turning up to see New World Order at Brighton Town Hall this week have had rather a different experience.

After being swiped with a metal detector by a grim-faced, camouflage- clad soldier, patrons are marshalled around the building to be confronted by scenes of torture, violence and interrogation.

Director Ellie Jones said the performance, formed of sketches, prose and poetry by Nobel Prizewinning dramatist Harold Pinter, was intended to be an "experience" rather than a play.

She said: "It's not a very pleasant experience for the audience - there aren't many laughs. We want to present people with a version of Brighton in the future, which has skewed itself into a fundamentalist state.

"If you're right up close to the action and you're still prepared to just watch it, then that says something.

I think that's what we do - we watch terrible things on the news and read about them in the paper but we don't act. Maybe someone will walk away from this play and be galvanised to action."

The production has had mixed reviews. Argus critic Bella Todd noted that it failed to engage some audience members, despite the harrowing nature of the material.

On the Argus festival website (www.theargus,co.uk/festival), reader Karen Dugdale said she left "feeling rather cross and completely unmoved by the entire event".

But audience member David Mortimer said the performance was still playing on his mind three days later. Barrie Judd was also impressed, writing that it was "one of the most shocking, brutal and brilliant pieces of theatre I have ever seen".

He added: "It's a completely disorienting experience winding through the corridors of the town hall, and this makes it easier to feel suitably trapped', like those victims in the plays themselves."

The performance begins in the council chamber, lined with boards listing the names of every mayor since the town hall was built in 1830. It continues in the anteroom, where a man is being questioned by the head of secret police.

As the atmosphere becomes ever more sinister, the audience are led down the grand staircase through the dark, damp bowels of the building, where the town's first police station operated until the 1960s.

The old jail cells are used for one scene, and the room where Chief Constable Henry Solomon was killed by a thief wielding a poker is used for another.

Co-producer and actor Richard Hahlo said the contrast between the council chamber and the basement rooms was disorientating. "It's a very claustrophobic, oppressive atmosphere. There have been one or two people who've left half-way through but I think that's because it makes people feel uncomfortable.

Most people are riveted."