If you go to a “site-specific performance” you expect to wander through a room or two watching a play about Afghanistan, Iraq or whatever is troubling the troupe involved. You don’t usually become a one-person ghost train. You don’t walk maybe half a mile, encounter increasingly awful images and end up being chased by a hunched man with a chainsaw. But then I’ve never seen a more ambitious, elaborate example of site-specific work than the show that Punchdrunk has created in a drab office block as part of the Manchester International Festival.

The company’s target is America 50 years ago, an era when it believes that Uncle Sam began to morph into Globocop. Dark corridor follows dark corridor, first leading you to comfy suburban pads, but soon becoming more official: typewriters carrying CIA reports on undesirables, death certificates, monitoring apparatus, a table-bed with straps attached, a chamber with streaked blood on its tiles, a body on the floor, a mad face at a window — and then a Hollywood studio with a voiceover denouncing the “sickness” of gays.

So to a large room in which that secret gay, Rock Hudson, is seen romancing Doris Day. That’s one of many contrasts in a 35-minute film by Adam Curtis that accuses the CIA of trying to kill Castro, organising disastrous coups, putting Saddam in power, indirectly creating the Aids epidemic and much else. But would the generosity and, yes, goodness of the US be acknowledged? Not there, not anywhere. Even its computers were apparently guilty of fostering debt crises.

Each room is carefully furnished, each moment brilliantly detailed, often with realistic dummies hovering over desks packed with mugs, cigs and sinister paperwork. TV monitors add to the sense of fragmentation and/or nightmare, often showing the face of a woman being raped in an evocation of the pop song that gives the show its title: “He beat me and it felt like a kiss.” But I began to weary when I was forced (“Do you believe in freedom?”) to fill in a period questionnaire. And, after two hours spent encountering wire netting, screeches, strobe lighting, a tramp in a rubbish dump, everything, anything, I felt that I had survived quite an ordeal.

Box office: 0844 8154960. To July 19

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