Belvoir’s production of British writer Sam Holcroft’s hall-of-mirrors satire begins before you even reach your seat.

Ascending the stairs to the theatre, you pass archival posters from the company’s past wrapped in brown paper and stamped “censored”. It’s a playfully loaded gesture; Belvoir imagining its own suppression.

Once inside, the destabilising games continue. What starts as a wedding ceremony between two earnest young lovers fractures midway through the vows. This is not a wedding at all but an unlicensed staging of a play set in the State Culture Department. We are not guests but witnesses to something prohibited. Our presence, we’re warned, may have consequences.

Faisal Hamza, Rose Riley and Eden Falk in A Mirror. Photo © Brett Boardman

The celebrant (Yale Ozucelik) pivots into Mr Čelik, a senior Culture Ministry bureaucrat whose avuncular ease cloaks an instinct for control. The bride and groom become Mei (Rose Riley), a former frontline soldier newly recruited to the ministry, and Adem (Faisal Hamza), a mechanic whose debut playwriting effort has rattled the censors.

Adem’s offence is straightforward: he records reality. His memory is camera-like; he reproduces conversations word-for-daming-word. His idea of theatrical truth is dangerously raw.

Nevertheless, Čelik – who likes to think of himself as more of an impresario than an enforcer – detects promise. Enlisting Bax (Eden Falk), a once-respected dramatist now producing state-sanctioned, morale-boosting slop, he attempts to refashion Adem into something more manageable.

The proposition is familiar to any artist: compromise a little; smooth a few edges; consider the funding landscape; give the people what they need.

Rose Riley and Faisal Hamza in A Mirror. Photo © Brett Boardman

Holcroft’s satire lands because it recognises that censorship rarely arrives in jackboots. It’s bureaucratic, incremental, couched in the language of responsibility and public good. And while the play’s fictional ministry feels comically familiar in some ways, questions raised within it linger. Who, in our own federal and state culture bodies, decides what is “appropriate”? How much self-censorship is quietly practised in rehearsal rooms and grant applications?

Rose Riley and Yalin Ozucelik in A Mirror. Photo © Brett Boardman

Directed by Margaret Thanos, A Mirror is stimulating theatre. This opening night showed moments of hesitancy, but the performances are incisive, led by Ozucelik who skilfully peels the many layers of Čelik’s character. Falk makes Bax both heroic and tragic (I found myself reminded of the compromised playwright at the centre of the German film The Lives Of Others). Riley charts Mei’s cultural awakening with affecting clarity. Hamza gives Adem a nervous integrity that resists easy reading.

The play’s ending – which can’t be spoken of without reducing its impact – is well handled. It certainly puts a dark spin on the idea of a “captive audience”.

A Mirror plays at Belvoir until 26 March.