Is it too soon to begin writing plays about Guantánamo Bay? Or does the fact that Channel 4 has already turned the Camp Delta method into a reality show now mean that it's open season for anything in an orange jumpsuit?
Oldham-based Peshkar Productions is one of the country's most boldly innovative companies, and this project by Manchester playwright Avaes Mohammad is their most inflammatory piece to date. It's not perfect, but a balanced account of life in the Cuban hellhole is probably beyond anyone's grasp at the moment.
Channel 4's controversial experiment, Torture: the Guantánamo Guidebook, provided a discomforting introduction to dehumanising procedures such as "scenery up, scenery down", during which detainees would be made to swap cells in the middle of the night to prevent friendships being formed.
Mohammad pushes things a stage further: physical and sexual abuse, humiliation and religious affront are all graphically - perhaps too graphically - displayed. Sarfraz, a bewildered student from Blackburn, is smashed around his cage with suchferocity that you seriously worry for the wellbeing of actor Asif Khan.
But between outbreaks of violence, the play deals with the intolerable mundanity of false imprisonment. The detainees - all Muslim, all British and all, we are led to assume, incarcerated by some dreadful mistake - pace around, swat flies, and speculate how Liverpool are getting on in the league.
Gradually, an ideological division opens between Sarfraz and his neighbour Hamza (Gary Stoner). Hamza believes in a progressive, liberalised form of Islam, while Sarfraz simply shows how inhuman treatment further entrenches fundamentalism.
Mohammad takes pains to present an even-handed, self-critical argument, yet the key dialogue emerges too late in the play to develop as engagingly as it might. Nor are the wire-obstructed sightlines of Emma Wee's set particularly helpful - though if it had been scenery up, scenery down in the Rumsfeld sense, such a rapprochement between prisoners would never have occurred at all.
· At the Contact Theatre, Manchester, April 18-21. Box office: 0161-274 0600. Then touring.
