To step into the Battersea Arts Centre, venue for the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk’s latest production, The Masque of the Red Death, is to step out of your comfort zone. The entire building has been turned into an insanely intricate universe, its labyrinthine corridors and back rooms stalked by tortured characters from a selection of Edgar Allan Poe short stories. The cast act out their roles as they pass through and interact with the audience, who are constantly unsure of what is around the next corner or lurking behind them. A bass-heavy rumble fills the building, and screaming – or is it laughter? – echoes from unseen rooms.

Posing as an usher during the first preview, I watch teenagers, conga-chained together in terror, shove to be the last through the door into a new room, which could contain goodness knows what. Savvier attendees, many of whom have accepted the company’s invitation to wear evening dress, explore alone – but jump when they meet a fellow audience member rounding a corner.

The tension and uncertainty is painstakingly created by Punchdrunk, whose interpretation of Goethe’s Faust, played out in a disused London warehouse, was one of last year’s theatrical high-lights and will tour to New York this spring. The artistic director, Felix Barrett, a wild-haired 30-year-old who founded Punchdrunk fresh from university seven years ago, says: “We do everything we can to make people feel uneasy. When you’re on your toes, with adrenaline shooting around your body and all of your synapses firing, you’re most receptive to the stimuli we give you.”

The unease sets in the moment you enter the building – through a side door, rather than the main foyer. The company, with the BAC’s artistic director, David Jubb, and the architect Steve Tomp-kins (shortlisted for the Stirling prize for his Young Vic renovation), have turned the arts centre into a parallel world. Staff have been evicted from their offices and relegated to an old kitchen, and a neighbouring register office has been appropriated. The spaces have been transformed into a maze of Parisian backstreets, opium dens, gnarled forests and spectacular ballrooms. A longtime BAC staff member, guiding me through the set, loses her way.

The production, the first of three in what the BAC is calling its “playground project”, is intended to unlock new performance potential in the building, which started life as a town hall in 1893 and became an arts centre in 1974. The conversion has uncovered original features such as marble fireplaces behind 1960s breeze blocks. Most of the modifications will remain until altered by a future production. “We want people to feel they’re walking into a death trap,” Barrett says. “It costs a fortune to make it seem so dangerous – we spend tens of thousands of pounds on emergency lights, fire alarms and ushers. But it should feel rickety and treacherous.”

Every room is filled with obsessively intricate props. The company has, for the first time, employed a head of detail, tasked with ensuring that if an audience member chooses to open a drawer, flick through a diary or turn over a yellowing photograph, they will uncover significant messages and artefacts that fit into the narrative. Weekly e-mails have asked the production team to bring in everything from shells to nail clippings.

The set is so dense with narrative that it is fascinating to explore even when empty. But with the 25-strong cast let loose, its world comes alive. Attendees have to create their own narrative from the intertwined story lines developing concurrently throughout the building. “The point of Punchdrunk was to get away from the safety and staidness of so much theatre,” Barrett explains. “Normally, you sit back in your red seat, the lights go down and you see the show. We wanted to shake things up – to make the audience the epicentre, to let them shape their experience within what we create.”

Audience members are left visibly unsettled by interactions with the cast, which often reach an intensity rare except between lovers. I watch as a perfumer massages a tense audience member’s hand and wrist, forcing his friends out of her scented shop before selecting from the ranks of vials and atomisers what she deems his ideal perfume. Other cast members make flirtatiously focused eye contact while stroking attendees’ hair, whispering in ears or placing treats in mouths. The most privileged audience members find themselves dragged or enticed into tiny side rooms, alone with a cast member. Barrett considers what follows, behind a locked door, the distillate of what Punchdrunk does. Past productions have left audience members bedevilled by card tricks or compelled to follow actors on hands and knees through pitch-black ventilation ducts.

“In an ideal world, we’d do the whole production for only one person at a time,” says Barrett. To compensate for that impossibility, every attendee has to wear a white mask, to differentiate them from the performers, conceal reactions and make the rest of the audience a blank-faced background. “The masks make what we do possible,” Barrett says. “Like this, you’re on your own. They also empower. You can go right up to performers, and you can forget the people around you.”

The Masque of the Red Death won’t please everyone. Some who attended Punchdrunk’s Faust found themselves too spooked to enjoy it. Others disliked exploring alone after losing their companions. Still others complained that they left without a coherent sense of the story line. The new production is even less likely to please those who insist on beginnings, middles and ends, drawing as it does on many stories, which combine only loosely into an overarching narrative. This does not worry Barrett. “We’re working on the assumption that the audience hasn’t read the stories,” he says. “The play should work even if you don’t know who Poe is. It should be an adventure, and you should be able to pick up on the themes, even if you only grasp the characters and narratives in a loose, dream-like way. But if you’re a Poe academic, it should still be full of detail to satisfy – you’ll understand why there’s a gorilla skeleton in a cage in a particular room.

“There’s no right way to go about understanding it or experiencing it. But the more curious you are, the more you push it, the more the production will bend to accommodate you.” An off-putting invitation for some; an irresistible challenge to others.

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