"Everyone shout NO CLOTHES!"

“That’s all we have time for tonight, ladies and gentlemen! Really, this is the last one! So give it up one final time for… Lady Georgina and her friends!”

It’s the fourteenth encore. The entire female cast of The Working-Class Witch, minus Annie, stands in a row on their stage with their hands linked, all wearing nothing but stockings and corsets. The blushes on their faces look unsimulated. They take a deep bow, then turn around so they’re facing away from the audience, and take another one.

“That was amazing,” says Meg, bouncing up and down in her seat. “So funny! And so clever! The scene where Annie tricks all the duchesses into getting themselves **** by the Turkish sultan! The scene where she convinces them they have to spank each other to break her curse! Why isn’t theater like this all the time?”

“She really is talented, isn’t she?”

“Who?”

“A. J. Muchstuff.”

“A. J. Muchstuff wrote this? Wait, A. J. Muchstuff is a woman?”

“Wrote. Directed. Starred in it. All the other actresses are close personal friends of hers, apparently. Of course, I say actresses, but she uses a very… naturalistic mode of performance.”

“Starred in it? You mean…” Meg looks at the perky blonde on stage, bouncing around in her maid uniform, playfully smacking the red bottoms of the nude duchesses as they stand quivering on stage with their arms by their sides, exposed to the uproarious laughter of the audience. “THAT’S A. J. Muchstuff?”

“Shh! There’s one last bit!”

“We’ve had a lot of fun tonight, haven’t we, ladies and gentlemen?” Annie, or A. J. Muchstuff, if that’s who it is, has her arms round two of the duchesses, groping their breasts from behind as she smiles out at the audience. “Isn’t it dreadfully amusing to see people losing their clothes? Other people, I mean. Especially here in stuffy old England, where dignity is so terribly important.”

She’s rewarded by more cheers, and cries of “hurrah!”. There’s a naughty gleam in her eyes. A familiar gleam.

“Wait.”

“Yes, Meg?”

“Sitri. We have to get out of here right now.”

“Why is that, Meg?”

“Don’t you see what she’s building up to? Sitri, we have to leave!”

“I don’t know where this is going at all. I want to hear the punchline.”

“But it’s obvious! Sitri!” Meg’s tugging at your arm, but you ignore her. She’s causing a small commotion. The woman sitting on the other side of you, a half-Jamaican, half-Irish marketing executive from Liverpool, looks at her, puzzled. “We don’t have much time before…”

“And since you all enjoy it so much,” says Annie, letting go of the duchesses and stepping forward into the spotlight at center stage. “I have one final present for you. My last little joke. You all thought my jokes were ever so funny when they were happening on stage, didn’t you? Do you want to see the best one? Ladies and gentlemen, do you want to see more people lose their clothes?”

There’s a roar of approval from the crowd. “Yes!” cries the woman next to you, bouncing up and down in her seat with sadistic glee, along with her five best female friends and one mild-mannered French guy who she vaguely knows from work. “Yes, we want to see more people lose their clothes! Do it! Hahaha!”

“Sitri! How can they not see it coming?” Meg’s given up on trying to get you to move and is trying to get to the exit, but she can’t climb over the audience quick enough. An elegant freckled redhead in a slinky black evening gown, head of design for a major European cosmetics brand, shakes her head disapprovingly as Meg stumbles into her lap.

“If that’s what you want, everyone. Let’s count down. On zero, everyone shout NO CLOTHES! Ten… nine… eight…”

The exit’s still very far away from poor Meg.

“Seven… six… five… four…” chants the crowd.

She breaks free from the seating, and bolts for the emergency exit at the back of the theatre, the one that leads directly out into the street. Still too far away.

“Three… two… one… NO CLOTHES!” the hundreds of cheering women shout at the top of their lungs, followed by an ear-splitting chorus of “EEEEEEEEEEEK!”s. Annie throws her head back in laughter as all the male cast members of The Working-Class Witch, including the incredibly hot guy who played the Duke of Smackingham and several dozen extras in waistcoats, run out onto the stage in front of the nude duchesses. All of them are holding expensive video cameras, which they aim at the audience.

You and the French guy exchange professional nods, before turning your attention to the all-important matter of mentally recording every last intimate detail of the scene unfolding around you.

The marketing executive and her five best friends are squealing in their seats, hands cupped over their breasts and pussies as they try very belatedly to hide their shame. You’re surrounded by wiggling bare bottoms, jiggling bare breasts, flashing thighs, flying hair and very red faces as the audience, or at least the female component of it, cowers and yelps and tries to hide behind one another, while the cameras on stage zoom in to capture every quivering detail.

Every last woman in the audience has been stripped completely stark naked in an instant. The girls wear makeup, jewellery, shoes and nothing else.

“That’s right, girls!” Annie stands at center stage, still in her maid costume, laughing at the crowd. “Not so funny, is it? Not so funny when the play watches back!”

Meg is frozen.

She’s standing on top of a short staircase in the busy main street outside the Getgood Theater, before a huge crowd of theater-goers and perhaps a hundred tabloid paparazzi. It seems there’s been some kind of tip that something interesting might be happening outside the theater tonight. Several other tempting doors lead out of the theater into the streets, and the photographers have the whole building surrounded.

Had she escaped even one second later, she would have been fine.

Unluckily for Meg, she didn’t make it out in time. She was still just barely inside the Theater when the audience shouted “NO CLOTHES!”

Which means that she is now standing in the busy street, on the raised staircase, in front of all the paparazzi and the nightly London theatre-going crowds. The first girl out the door. Isolated. Alone.

With no clothes on.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!”