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...