It could be a package holiday destination like any other: tropical climate, beautiful private beach, a local airstrip and a food court with a McDonald’s, Starbucks and the world’s last remaining Blockbuster video shop.

But while Guantánamo Bay is anything but a travel resort, one show at the Edinburgh fringe is reimagining a different future for the notorious US military detention centre.

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Last Resort, an immersive production, invites the audience to become package holidaymakers in Guantánamo, with its creators, Tom Barnes and Eve Parmiter, as the holiday reps. The show plays on the bizarre realities of the American naval base in Cuba, where there is already a holiday resort for use by American military personnel and their families “while in the building next door, people are being detained for terror offences that they may or may not have committed”, said Barnes.

For Barnes, the inspiration for the show was about rethinking Guantánamo, which still holds 41 prisoners, uses torture techniques and detains people indefinitely without trial, and yet which many people have come to accept and comfortably coexist with.

“Everything in the show lives in the world of the holiday resort, but the content within that comes from Guantánamo Bay as a detention centre,” said Barnes.

“We’ve taken all the torture techniques used – known as enhanced interrogation techniques, which is just a euphemism for methods of torture – and transposed them all into the world of the holiday resort, which actually proved alarmingly easy.

“For example, in Guantánamo, the place that people get tortured with music is colloquially known as the disco because you can always hear pumping music in the distance, so that becomes our resort disco playing the same songs used to torture people, such as the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive or Eminem’s Without Me.”

Barnes based the show on testimony from former inmates such as Shaker Aamer, who was held in Guantánamo for 13 years without charge before being released in 2015, declassified documents and interviews with Reprieve, the organisation that represents Guantánamo inmates and whose caseworkers regularly visit the prison.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We want to empower people’ … Last Resort. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Katie Taylor, deputy director of Reprieve, said the show was timely as it coincided with Reprieve putting pressure on the Scottish and UK governments to come clean about the use of Scottish airports for CIA rendition flights between 2001 and 2003, part of a broader call for transparency over the UK’s complicit involvement in the war on terror abuses.

With Donald Trump’s pro-torture stance well documented, Taylor said it was important that people did not become immune to what still goes on at Guantánamo and that Last Resort “has the possibility of reinvigorating the issue in people’s minds”.

“I was really impressed with this show because, even though I initially had my concerns about the idea, when I saw it I appreciated how thoughtfully it was handled,” said Taylor. “To allow people to imagine the scenarios of what it is to be detained at Guantánamo is a really effective way of raising people’s consciousness, a reminder of what those 41 still detained there have to go through, even though 31 of them have never even been charged with crime.”

Taylor added: “I’ve been working on this issue since 2010 and that’s drained me a lot of my creativity, so that’s the benefit of works like this: coming in from a different angle, and reflecting things that those of us immersed in the day-to-day slog might have missed.”

The play also highlights the idiosyncrasies of the Guantánamo military base. For example, it is home to the last remaining Blockbuster video shop, Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook is among the banned books and the Endangered Species Act means that if you kill an iguana on the airbase you could be fined £10,000 – which, Barnes points out, means “the iguanas have more rights to life than the detainees do”.

The show also puts audience members in stress positions without them noticing. Simple positions like holding your arms above your head, can initially feel like a stretch, but if you are forced to maintain the position for four hours, it becomes like one of the interrogation techniques used in Guantánamo.

Barnes said it was this line between taking something we consider comfortable – from music to stretching to eating – and turning it into something that is very uncomfortable and traumatic – that he wanted to explore in Last Resort. While the show starts off seemingly lightheartedly, it delves into the darker realities of what it feels like to be force-fed or subjected to waterboarding.

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Parmiter said the play was not about pushing a view of Guantánamo. Through audience participation, the show illustrates how divided people remain about the issue and where their red lines are, particularly in light of the recent terror attacks across Europe, she said.

Barnes said: “This is not a condemnation, we challenge both sides of the argument quite carefully. But the lack of process and the lack of transparency that surrounds it is what needs to change. We want to empower people, for it to be a provocation to go off and actually think about how comfortable they are with Guantánamo Bay.”