Dreamthinkspeak has an international reputation for creating extraordinary immersive theatre installations and its latest production, Absent, is a welcome addition to its canon.

The experience begins before you enter the building. The transformation of the exterior of Shoreditch Town Hall into a hotel is so effective that I actually walked straight past it. Inspired by the life of the Duchess of Argyll, who lived in a luxury hotel until eventually evicted, the piece is a haunting exploration of loneliness, declining gentility and corporate greed.

The audience is free to wander a building in transition, filled with ghosts of the past and glimpses of the future.

Artistic Director Tristan Sharps has always been fascinated by architectural models and here they are a perfect fit for the subject. Absent is about a building changing from grand to functional and we are potential investors on a viewing.  The switches from macro to micro make sense. The Shoreditch Group’s profits are booming, room rates start at £60, the project will regenerate the area. It is grimly real. Just read the Evening Standard.

As in most of his work, Sharps plays here with scale and form, using film and false mirrors, inviting us through wardrobe doors into barren spaces, leaving clues of habitation. Here a bottle of Chantal perfume on a creaky shelf, its scent pervading the room, there a pile of Burmatex carpet tiles ready for laying. I felt like a forensic scientist investigating a missing person.

It is not a spoiler to say (as Sharps did on Radio 4) that there is a lack of physical presence in the piece. Had I known in advance, I would have spent more time observing the one live actress playing Margaret de Beaumont. Fortunately the filmed world is compelling and evocative, featuring a luminous performance by Marion Déprez.

Absent is a simpler piece to those of recent years but no less powerful. In The Beginning Was The End (2013), at Somerset House, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, was playful and interactive, brightly lit and slightly scary. Before I Sleep, which I saw at the old Co-Op in Brighton, 2010, was a lavish and thrilling take on The Cherry Orchard with a cast of hundreds.  Whereas in those productions the building was a space in which to make the work, in Absent the building is the work. There are some familiar tropes – the bringing of ‘outside’ into this interior landscape, a child, a gentle sound-score, and the silent guides. If the scale is more of a novella than epic, it remains a beautifully executed experience.

On leaving, you can’t help but notice how pertinent the vision is, with gentrification all around. The former magistrates’ court and police station opposite is, guess what? A hotel.