THIS IS FAKE THEATRE read the wording on the triangular video screen, but this is not a fake review – even if sometimes theatre critics receive disbelieving letters asking "Was your reviewer at the same show?".

In this age of post-truth, alternative facts and even conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories, iconoclastic Scottish choreographer and director Rosie Kay is asking awkward questions through the medium of hypnotic dance and documentary footage about "why popular culture has never been so odd – a world filled with satanic images, occult messages, hidden symbols and hyper-sexualisation, packaged for the mainstream".

Why is the screen triangular in Louis Price's video and set design? Apparently, it is the symbol of the Illuminati, who apparently introduced a mind control programme called MK Ultra that equally apparently exerted "illusory control" over such pop prodigies as Britney Spears and maybe Michael Jackson, given Kay's choreographic imagery and composer Annie Mahtani's mash-up edits.

Gary Coad's body-stocking costume designs are covered in strategically placed symbols too that appear to dance in their own right in the fearless, furious and increasingly frazzled dancing of Shanelle Clemenson, Harriet Ellis, Shelley Eva Haden, Lizzie Klotz, Joao Maio, Ryan Munroe and Oliver Russell, who go beyond the point of exhaustion in their search for meaning now that we challenge everything uttered in the cause of politics, science, religion and populist music. They rose to their feet anew for a Disney-glossy When You Wish Upon Star, but delivered as fake as could be.

On the back cover of MK Ultra's programme is a survey asking where in your body did you "feel" this dance, from mind/brain to stomach/gut to nowhere, and everywhere in between. Judging by the more than lively question-and-answer session afterwards in the bar with Kay, her dancers and the show's creative collaborator, BBC documentary film-maker Adam Curtis, head and heart were engaged, but the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth around us could now be anything but the truth.