Tim Hughes is shell-shocked by an immersive production hinting at the experience of soldiers in the First World War

"Take one" says a bored-looking man holding a bucket of mutilated toy soldiers – some green, some brown.

We do as we are told and march on.

"Green or brown" shouts a young woman in camouflage and a hood, as we are separated and sent marching across a field to face each other over a no-man's land of skeletal trees and sinister watch towers, held back by a line of posts and a rope.

Disjointed snatches of dialogue, lines from a soldier's letter home, are repeated as we grow bored and uneasy, until suddenly the signal goes, and the ropes are dropped – sending us spilling towards each other, confused, awkward and disorientated.

This is not what I was expecting; what any of us were expecting.

Furious Folly, which played out on Magdalen College School's sport fields at the weekend, was not so much a play as an immersive conceptual experiment – with the audience the unwitting cast.

Written by Mark Anderson it is modelled on the battle of the Somme, the centenary of which we have been commemorating. And it was the confusion, noise, fury and, most disconcerting of all, the silence, which he succeeded in creating on Magdalen's fields.

Flares rise into the sky and a barrage of pyrotechnics, in front and behind, mimicking field gun, mortar, machine gun and rifle is unleashed in a dizzying display.

While the whoops and cheers from beyond the field suggest it was a fine firework display, the effect at close quarters, with the stink of gunpowder and the ringing in the ears, was far more unsettling. And when the rattles are sounded and a sickly green smoke drifts across no man's land we realise we are under gas attack – and have no where to run.

While some of the symbolism was ambiguous (were the individuals in the four watchtowers representatives of the belligerents?), it made its powerful point – turning the tables and leaving us unsettled, edgy and bewildered – just like war itself. A shell-shocking triumph.

5/5 TIM HUGHES