We were shut into a doughnut-shaped pen ringing a central platform. The lights went off, music started up – you know the kind: weird mixed beats with vocal samples (sinister vocal samples) overlaid – and the central platform started to rise up, lifting a white canvas banner, onto which was projected a slowly rising fuse. I am not 100 percent sure of the chronology of what happened after that. There were fireworks in the middle; there were fireworks behind and all around the outer edge of the crowd, arcing inwards so that sometimes you were enclosed by a dome of brilliant light; there was a woman in black clothes edged with what might have been tinsel who made strange humming noises and exhorted the audience to do the same in order to invoke fireworks; at some point burning wicker men appeared and exploded, then came alive and started walking through the crowd; there was so much smoke you couldn’t see the sky; it rained firework debris.

Was it theatre? Probably not – something can be theatrical without being theatre. There was a short film at the beginning, mixing animation with what looked like footage of the London Tube bombings, and I don’t think it had any place there. Not that it mattered. It was soon forgotten, and at the end of the show a boy in front of me turned to his mother and said, ‘That was magnificent.’ He was about ten, and you could tell the word was at the very top of his personal vocabulary.