WHAT do you get if you take a group of young adults who have been through the care system, and shut them in a disused office building with face-paint, costumes and a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion?

What if a plague is raging outside (so they say) and they can only eat if they maintain their posh turn-of-the-century characters, or be punished?

What if this bizarre subjection of vulnerable people to thespian instruments of torture is being streamed live for voyeurs with a taste for psychological breakdown in period costume, like a kind of agonising, stage-struck Luvvie Island?

This scenario establishes a pressure cooker of paranoia and rivalry, and what it delivers to the audience is the spectacle of the “well-made play” being continuously detonated from within.

While the declared intention of the production is to offer empowerment and creative development to its young cast, the show is at its most powerful when theatre is interpreted as a form of sadistic authority that dangles the carrot of wages in order to profit from the vulnerability of those it puts on display.

Each cast member is subjected to a humiliating audition that exposes their anger, fragility and desperation, and these characteristics keep breaking through their supposed characters.

It is a rich brew that develops its own dynamic as a drama, and the committedness of the women in particular shines out. Together they become a savage tribe, a kind of Lord Of The Flies in grubby lace skirts, locked inside the acting box.

There are hilarious moments when, for example, they sit at dinner eating crisps from fine china, and Natalie Rochacelli as Eliza Doolittle comments with perfectly enunciated sarcasm on the table manners of her neighbour, the misfit playing Colonel Pickering. Louise Scott as a ferocious Scottish parlourmaid also glides effortlessly between the layers of her part, from servant to caustic commentator, with delicious ease.

Halfway through a journalist, played with anguished intensity by Kieran McKenzie, breaks in to be tortured by the cast. His offer of understanding and escape is compelling, but like everything else on show is it in fact no more than an excellent performance?

This kind of work recalls the impact on Scottish theatre of Jeremy Weller’s Grassmarket Project in the 1990s, and the shows he devised with the homeless, with young offenders, the elderly and the mentally ill. The paradox of such work is that when a “real” person performs themselves, do they reveal or conceal their social authenticity?

This is the theme that The Dodo Experiment toys with in its various and violent tableau, but without coming to a conclusion.

Briskly directed by Fiona McKinnon and supported by a team from the Citizens Theatre, this show and others like it have the energy and potential to speak to a wide audience, and to occupy and subvert the many vacant office and retail spaces that hollow out city centres throughout the country.