Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Light is a post-Snowden piece that sets out to predict how technological advances in surveillance will affect our lives. It centres around the invention of a brain implant that allows wearers to read each other’s minds. In principle, this allows characters to send messages to each other across large distances. By the end of the 21st century, everyone in the country is fitted with one.

Light itself is more of a formal focus than a thematic one, and its use is well controlled. The company have considered thoroughly what quality of light is required for each scene, as well as how the actors themselves can use handheld torches to achieve this. There is great variety on this front: actors appear and disappear all over the stage, wherever necessary, no matter how technically difficult an entrance it is to achieve.

Likewise, darkness is important here too. It helps the actors to set a pounding pace and intense tone from the opening moments as Alex, our protagonist, flits in and out of violent visions in his nightmares. It takes a blackout that is no longer than a heartbeat for Alex to move from violently stabbing another character centre stage to being found sound asleep again in his bed metres upstage.

The plot revolves around Alex: an enforcer working within the upper echelons of government. His father is the dictatorial president. Alex’s day job is to capture and interrogate terrorists and his implant allows him to interrogate these transgressors very effectively.

It is in one of these interrogations that we see one of Theatre Ad Infinitum’s most innovative images: a woman’s shadow is projected onto a screen, the source of light shifted so that the image appears to zoom and focus with warped control on vital details. At one point this is a doctor’s syringe, pumping hallucinogenic fluid into the subject’s neck. Suddenly red, green and white light sources are used to refract light around her silhouette; they flicker as she squirms so that her body becomes an infinity of chaos. It is the finest abstract image of onset madness that I have seen.

Where the show falters however is in its plot and purpose. The plot is remarkably cliché, and predictable. Each of the plots twists – bar the final five minutes – can be reliably predicted before they are revealed. This led to a mawkish ‘I am your mother’ moment that, though played seriously, caused muffled titters from one or two audience members.

The purpose of the show is clear: to warn its audience about the dangers of giving the government too much power. Our first problem here is that we see the world only through Alex’s eyes. The government can read your mind and torture you effectively, yes, but the strength of surveillance-based dystopian futures such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was that we saw what happened to the ordinary man on the street. Alex is almost aristocratic; he fails his father and so the system turns against him. The ordinary people living in the England depicted in Light are happy, and therefore meet no punishment. The only exception is an everyman in one sequence who goes to desperate measures to have his implant removed – an illegal act. At no point is his motive for transgressing even hinted at. He just knows that it is bad.

What’s more, all these are not a new revelations; this is also not knowledge hiding in plain sight. The recent Snowden affair (the show’s main influence) has done enough to keep these issues very much at the forefront of our consciences over the past 18 months. There is no epiphany here that wasn’t first experienced – and more powerfully so – 65 years ago in Orwell. Headlong’s adaptation last year brought those same themes to home in a much more crushing fashion than Light ever comes close to.

If exploring the form of a play through light is enough to entice you, or you are interested something visually out of the ordinary, there are a few masterfully deft touches and turns to be enjoyed watching Light. Ultimately however, though a technically impressive feat, this is not a piece of theatre that adds to our understanding of its subject. Its purpose as a political statement against hyper-surveillance is limply executed. I left disappointed.

Light is playing at The Pit, Barbican Centre until 24 January as part of the London International Mime Festival. For more information and tickets, see the Barbican website.