The Wooster Group are the Rolling Stones of the New York theatrical avant-garde, post-modern pioneers who keep plugging away (the company dates back to 1967). In their time they’ve Woosterised Shakespeare, O’Neill, Racine and more.

In The Town Hall Affair, under direction from Elizabeth LeCompte, they at once reconstruct and deconstruct one of the most notorious intellectual ding-dongs of the Seventies. This was the fraught, often comically so, slug-out at New York’s town hall on April 30, 1971, between that embodiment of male artistic prestige Norman Mailer and selected emissaries for “Women’s Liberation” – including Germaine Greer, riding high off the back of The Female Eunuch.

For its part the Barbican has undertaken an impressive temporary rejig of its main auditorium, placing the audience on stage, and replicating the Woosters’ intimate hang-out in Manhattan, the Performing Garage. We’re looking at a lab-like environment, with a mission-control line of metal desks, equipped with microphones, while monitors intermittently relay black and white footage from the resulting documentary – Town Bloody Hall – released in 1979. With the run ending on Sunday, the net-result is a fleeting coterie experience. Given Greer’s high status and renewed notoriety (assisted by a recent BBC documentary) and much generally ado about feminism, not to mention the strangeness and finesse of this show, it should reach many more.

Ari Fliakos as Norman Mailer in the Town Hall Affair Credit: Alastair Muir

What’s most striking, perhaps, about the playful homage – which sees the seven principal actors often synchronising their speeches in time with the video and taking pains to replicate minor visual details – is that Greer’s contribution, articulate, witty and firmly academic, features less prominently than that of the activist Jill Johnston. The latter – author of Lesbian Nation - didn’t so much lock horns with Mailer – attempting, manfully and therefore rather risibly, to adjudicate – as dart like a butterfly around him, so whimsically ‘other’ in her behaviour as to puckishly subvert the occasion. “Lesbian is a good name which means nothing, of course, or everything,” Kate Valk’s Johnston – looking almost Valkyric with her long hair, jean-jacket, shades and flares – coo-coo-ca-choos.

“Either play with the team or pick up your marbles and get lost,” Mailer snaps, as the refusenik over-runs. “I want to talk to you about lesbianism, goddammit – I’m interested in what you said, you can play these games but they’re silly”. She has been rolling about with two female interlopers, leaving Mailer looking a little like Pentheus, ripped to shreds for intruding on the Bacchae. It’s his own insecurity, though, that undoes him – and in portraying him using two actors (Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos) who wind up wrestling each other (in an inter-textual nod to Mailer’s flop film Maidstone) the point is smartly made that the masculine order is riven by contradictions and anxieties.

In fact, the whole thing feels not only smart but pays tribute to intellectual cut and thrust. Most of those gathered at that podium that night are now gone – including the lofty, stern, unbiddable critic Diana Trilling (played by male actor Greg Mehrten). In summoning their ghosts, the show rekindles admiration for the battling spirit of bygone days and its respect for cogitation. The fact that the audience interruptions here are faithful simulations (using sound cues) rather than spontaneous intrusions gives you pause to consider the silencing of “debate” today. We troop in and out; this is a consumer experience. There’s little room for discussion, and maybe little certainty as to what we would say (or feel allowed to say) if the microphone was thrust in our way. So, this serves as a potent midsummer curiosity, then. But I dare them to bring it back for longer, and also throw it open to the floor.

Until Sunday. Tickets: 020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk; there’s a one-off screening of Town Bloody Hall at the Barbican cinema, Saturday June 23, 4pm.