Red plush curtains, leggy girls, guys in loud suits, big teeth smiles and loads of slap. What have we here? Yet another postmodern pastiche of the world of variety – a bag of cheap tricks that both send up and honour popular entertainment, the amusing-ourselves-to-death Big Night Out? Well, no. This being Forced Entertainment, we are not let off so lightly. Having set up the premise of a knowing romp through the fag-ends of show-business, the company move the whole thing onto another level. First Night uses techniques familiar from earlier work such as Speak Bitterness – toe curling personal confession, endless lists, the juxtaposing of the mundane and the profoundly important – and applies these to set pieces such as a wonderful re-working of the Mr Memory act in which audience members have the nature of their death foretold: 'You in the second row – breast cancer.’

We are pushed into a confrontational re-evaluation of our relationship to ‘theatre': our passivity is challenged – yet there is no obvious possibility of active engagement. Our choice is basically to put up or get out – which some do. We are exhorted to forget the outside world, then fed a list of things to forget, from babysitter problems to the car-crash down the road. And of course the urging of forgetfulness reminds us of the absurdity of the notion of theatre as a self-contained capsule existing outside of the time, space and action of the real world. But here we strike another irony: for First Night is in many ways a conventional drama – conforming to the Unities and fulfilling Aristotle's requirement of Catharsis. Laugh – I nearly died.