The title of Forced Entertainment's latest show is a deliberate and ironic misnomer. “Spectacular” it is not, at least not in any grandiose sense. Instead, what the Sheffield- based company, fast approaching its 25th anniversary, is offering in this deft, demanding and questioningly intelligent little two-hander is a postmodern black comedy that coolly yet playfully thwarts conventional theatre-going expectations while, by implication, rubbing our noses in our own mortality. The result is a decidedly different “good night out”.

The premise is disarmingly simple. Dressed like a skeleton, complete with mask, our ingratiatingly sardonic, middle-aged and pot-bellied host (Robin Arthur) looks instantly ridiculous. Normally, he says, there would be a warm-up act, someone to crack a few jokes. But tonight he is, in effect, it. The small band of musicians usually situated upstage left is also absent. We have to imagine their sound, and the plants that “gentle” the atmosphere of menace Arthur claims he creates from the moment he enters via a staircase that is likewise nowhere to be seen except in the mind's eye.

Into this stripped-down, faintly absurd atmosphere comes Claire Marshall in street clothes, ready to commence a dying scene that will last the length of the 75-minute performance. She writhes, grovels and groans and subsequently chokes, shudders, kicks and gasps in paroxysms of exaggerated agony. Her repetitive, self-melodramatising suffering is both giggle-inducing and disconcerting even though, like Arthur, we know it is nothing but an extended pretense. In moments of respite, when her convulsions temporarily subside, he continues to describe the show we are not seeing and his responses to it.

Spectacular spits in the eye of the artifice it also embraces. Irreverently it tickles our funny bones while asking how it is that we can go out seeking entertainment when the world - us included - is dying.

At Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, tonight and tomorrow. Box office: 01524 594151. Then touring

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