HOWARD BRENTON’S 2013 dramatic treatment of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s arrest and 81-day interrogation has acquired fresh relevance today, as part of Hampstead Theatre's “at home” online season.

With Trump rekindling cold-war embers, this well-tested dramatic formula of mental torture techniques, with the victim subjected to disorientation pressures designed to extort confessions, fits well into the media’s current anti-Chinese narrative.

The central interrogation, first by a fairly amateurish police unit who appear to be bewildered by their unusual prisoner, and then by the political department under military auspices, has a compelling authenticity owing to Benedict Wong’s convincing performance as the victim.

Looking remarkably like Ai Weiwei, he conveys the initial angry bewilderment which slowly transmutes into fear and despair as his persecutors move confusingly from threats to friendly concern.

There is humour in his futile attempts to explain the nature of his conceptual art to his bewildered tormentors, who cannot find “dumping millions of tons of worthless seeds on London, seeds made of clay that can’t even grow” as a work of art.

They are equally at sea when he quotes Marx and Mao in support of his arguments.

This strain of intellectual arrogance emerges in the final coda when, having been released owing to the Chinese awareness of Western responses to his arrest, he delivers a political homily direct to the audience, explaining that classical art embodies death and unless you change you are just part of “a flatulent mass.”

Ashley Martin Davis’s set for James MacDonald’s tight production has a large central freight container that opens out into the cramped space for the interrogation procedure. Outside, members of a small onstage audience mix with the cast as a society constantly under photographed surveillance goes about what Ai Weiwei sees as its heedless business.

Runs until May 3, hampsteadtheatre.com.