Forced Entertainment know how to get you where it hurts. They make you roar with laughter, then leave a ruin of a smile on your face as they force you to contemplate your own mortality. They can make you feel only as desperate as you can feel at 4am after a really good party when somebody turns on the overhead light.
In their latest show - carefully choreographed mayhem like an end-of-the-pier show having an existential crisis - they do all this and more. They present a theatre full of bright gaudy creatures all vying for attention under the bright lights of the stage, who, like shadows, slip into the darkness and disappear when the lights go down and are extinguished. Just as we do.
Along the way there is plenty of fun in a scenario where theatre meets rock concert: a woman runs around in a gorilla suit throwing popcorn, two naked men carrying cardboard silver stars contemplate beautiful silences, roadies offer unhelpful advice, the end of the world is acted out with pom-pom balls and tinsel, and a woman changes her clothes and pours water over herself like a tragic weeping Greek heroine or maybe just an abandoned rock chick.
This is one long, very knowing, wonderfully playful theatrical game on the nature of illusion, narrative and laughter that never becomes tedious or remote because it is so desperately human, so full of our frailties - our individual desire always to be centre-stage, to perform for the audience. It is ridiculously good.
Even the length of the show - two-and-a-half hours - as long as a traditional well-made play, is a little joke: played without an interval it becomes a feat of endurance for the audience.
At the end, the lights come up and it looks as if the place has been trashed. Like the end of the world. All that is left is detritus and dust.
· Until Friday. Box office: 020-8237 1111. Then touring.
