It was halfway through this powerful play when I realised what was naggingly familiar in this drama.

Describing her experiences as she is shifted from cell to cell, Sheila Niles' dissident journalist speaks of the small patch of cloud from a tiny window in the same way Oscar Wilde's murderer does in Reading Gaol.

Adshead's poetic (sometimes rather too over-written) text has parallels to Wilde's sympathy for the incarcerated as Niles unfolds the story of the unnamed woman fleeing her unnamed country after her family has been killed and she has been raped.

Niles's performance, in which she plays more than 40 characters, with an array of accents, is astonishing, bringing to life with shocking vividness both the victims of the brutalising process and the instigators.

And director Kully Thiari's creative use of lighting and sound effects grips right from the start.

The main protagonist's story unfolds slowly so, until the end, we're never quite sure whether she's 'bogus' or not.

It doesn't really matter - the play leaves you feeling that there must be a better system for treating human beings.

In fact, a strength of the piece is that the British are not presented as totally villainous.

There are pockets of decency: I particularly liked the portrayal of the solicitor who undergoes a makeover that parallels the rise of New Labour.

The play, written in 2000, has been revived and is on a UK tour. It's compulsive viewing for anyone but especially those who talk glibly about the good life faced by asylum seekers.