RULES is an immersive theatre experience inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish but also feels like you’ve stepped into an episode of Squid Game as it quietly implicates you in its machinery.

Presented by Taiwan’s Peng Nei Ren Troupe in their world premiere, this stark, unsettling theatrical experiment transforms the dimly lit Library at Ayers House into a classroom that becomes a system of surveillance, competition, and compliance. It’s part performance, part social study, and part psychological trap, executed with a firm hand by an overseer in a creepy red apple mask dictating the events.

Audience members enter a room that feels innocuous: seats fringe an open space before a desk, participants are given numbered badges, and a bell that announces the challenges ahead. Through each game, circles are rewarded for good performance, crosses punish hesitation or missteps, and the rankings shift in real time. The rules are never fully explained, yet everyone quickly learns how to behave.

The cleverness of RULES lies in how it weaponises silence and ambiguity. Without a central antagonist, the audience becomes both subject and enforcer. People watch each other, adjust their behaviour, and most disturbingly participate in the eliminations that keep the system running. Get four crosses and the poor performing participants are sent to “re-education”. The show draws heavily from Orwell and Foucault, not in narrative but in atmosphere. Power is dispersed, discipline is internalised, and the desire to “stay” becomes its own form of coercion.

While the games were fun and light-hearted, the piece was strongest when it exposed how quickly a group will self-regulate under pressure. Confused chatter about whether someone had followed the rules correctly, premature bingo calls and self-created paper planes that don’t beat its competitors become charged moments that ripple through the room. The performers, only participating to mark and rank the participants, orchestrate these shifts with remarkable subtlety. Despite a few technical glitches and a few prompts showing further rehearsals may be required to tighten the performance, overall it was a fairly controlled piece.

Where the show may divide audiences is in its emotional payoff. RULES is intentionally cold, ritualistic, and at times opaque. Its intellectual clarity is undeniable, but the lack of narrative or character creates emotional distance. Some participants may crave a sharper climax or a clearer resolution. Others will find the ambiguity precisely the point.

Still, as an exploration of productivity culture, social conditioning, and the quiet violence of conformity, RULES is bold, provocative, and well crafted. It asks its audience not just to observe a system of control, but to become complicit in it, and that makes for a Fringe experience that is as challenging as it is memorable.

RULES finished up at The Library at Ayers House on Saturday, February 28. Get your tickets here but be quick, they’re selling fast.

***1/2 stars

Three and a half stars.