Gameplay is a highly original experimental theatre piece with more meta trickery and time and character switching than most adult brains can assimilate in an hour. This is, in fact, the stage equivalent of Adam Curtis.

It’s brought to us by the people behind the acclaimed Lessons in Revolution – Carmen Collective – and is mounted in association with Pleasance and Camden People’s Theatre, who champion access theatre that makes this sort of Fringe production possible. It’s not one for your Auntie Marjorie, unless she’s a paid-up member of Greenpeace with a hankering for entirely non-plot-driven performance.

Sam Rees takes the stage like Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, clad in a black and white dinner suit, shirt and tie ensemble. For the next ten minutes he audio describes the situation in detail, including an introduction to the musical wizard that is his co-creator, the sound artist AJ Turner, also in dinner suit and white shirt. They play mainly a Tenori-on synthesiser to create a sweeping soundscape, with added guitar and violin.

The auditorium’s warm up music is a loop of the Four Little Swans dance from Swan Lake. This is a critical amuse bouche, because it is a key thematic element of the production. The dance featured on Russian State TV in the wake of the coup against Brezhnev and ultimately the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was shown as a film of the dance featuring four ballerinas that was looped on state TV, non-stop, for three days to “calm the situation.” It has since become a political trope for Russian activists and underpins the point of this ambitious and complex show.

Being extraordinarily meta in its construction, Rees and Taylor conflate this music with the story of a Russian submariner who was depth-bombed during the Cuban Missile Crisis and could easily have launched a nuclear missile that would have set off a chain reaction that would have ended the world, as well as trolling the right-wing theatre critic for The Daily Mail, Quentin Letts. How this comes together is the genius of the performance.

Class, politics, totalitarianism and a dash of Back to the Future all combine to make for a splendid hour of socialist, totalitarian nihilism, but with plenty to enjoy on the ride.