So this is what they call a “total immersive theatrical experience”, is it? Stumbling around in the near-Stygian gloom of the Battersea Arts Centre, going from room to room and watching, first, two blokes screaming and throwing books at each other. Next, a bloke crouching on the floor, screaming and vomiting. Next, an opium addict and a woman in a Chinese silk gown having a slow-motion scrap. Next, a nurse mopping up blood amid a powerful aroma of TCP.

Audience members must wear white plastic masks throughout. Mine didn’t fit well at all, mainly because I have a quite enormous head, but also because I’m an all-day four-eyes, so the mask kept squishing my glasses up against my watering eyeballs, only adding to the general sense of hopelessness and horror. I tried wearing it on top of my head, but was soon scolded by one of the “performing ushers”. I would have explained about the squished-eyeball problem, except another rule was NO TALKING, so I could only gesture helplessly. The usher glared at me and stalked on.

The sense that the company aren’t much bothered about the audience was confirmed when, during one of the fights, a girl had her glasses knocked off. In the book-throwing barney, meanwhile, one of the books hit a spectator. Punchdrunk say they are offering us “a freewheeling environment in which to explore and interact with live performance”, which is one way to describe being hit by a flying book, I suppose.

There is nothing so banal here as conventional storytelling, only uncontextualised, vaguely disturbing vignettes of human suffering and anguish, bullying and cruelty. The audience is bullied too – it’s like The Jeremy Kyle Show with added pretension. Sinister figures in cloaks and top hats shove you roughly out of the way, or whisper what sound like rude words behind your back. (Perhaps they’d been reading my notebook over my shoulder.) Far from engaging with the audience or putting it at the centre of the action, a performance like this leaves you feeling merely hemmed in, ticked off and herded around.

Punchdrunk’s Faust, last year, made them the critics’ darlings. Masque is the follow-up, supposedly inspired by the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, though you’d be hard-pressed to identify which. I think the two book-throwing blokes were both William Wilson, and the old man boozing in the cellar was from The Black Cat, but I couldn’t be sure; especially not when he started talking about how a good bottle of wine is like a woman, and you should never leave either “unfinished”, which sounded more like Swiss Toni than Poe. I still don’t know who the vomiting man was.

It’s very easy to get lost and very hard to find your way out. Finding myself back in the room with the book-throwing blokes for the third time, the theme had changed a little. Now, one of them was running around wild-eyed, his shirt hanging out, pointing around at all of us, the hapless spectators, and crying: “You’re not really here!” Was I the only one to think dolefully, “Yes, I really, really am”?

Poe is crudely reduced to the gory and macabre, excised of his melancholy, mysticism and strange beauty. Mysticism embarrasses us far more than gore nowadays, so it’s ignored and we’re left with a shrunken Poe, purveyor of rather cheesy horror stories. Turn these into Punchdrunk’s Masque and it’s not your terror threshold that’s tested but your irritation threshold. It’s a “dramatic intervention and interpretation”, don’t you know, “about performance and landscape in equal measure”, offering a place where “risk and possibility are alive and kicking”, and a “vision for the way theatres might look in the future”. One-way ticket to the past, please.

BAC, SW11

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