Poena 5X1

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Plays are often praised for feeling timely. But Abbie Spallen's new play feels anything but: it's a satire of a Britain that's obsessed with punishing paedophiles and criminals, at a time when the refugee crisis and atrocities overseas have just about made the country rediscover its collective social conscience. And the supposedly humane approach it proposes is anything but liberal.

Poena 5X1 is a drug designed to inflict unimaginable pain on criminals, making them relive their darkest moments. Bryony Adams is an apparently liberal scientist who's tasked with developing it, working in the bizarre belief that psychological torture is an appropriate way to reduce prison overcrowding, or to deter terrorists.

Director Robert Shaw stages Spallen's monologue as a lecture, presented by Adams to an audience of medical industry professionals. But although the lecturn, malfunctioning slideshow and power suit are all in evidence, there's nothing scientific about the philosophical quandary she presents. It's hard to think of someone of any political stripe who'd be happy with a situation where paedophiles were punished by being slipped a drug that out-nasties any medieval torture device, then let loose, still traumatised, onto the streets. And it makes even less sense as an anti-terrorism measure: how could the threat of a painful few hours of chemical torture ever hope to deter suicide bombers?