Tomorrow's Parties @ Contact, Manchester

The future always looms ahead of us and is always uncertain. Predicting and analysing the future has been a preoccupation for, amongst others, writers, politicians and psychics doing readings in the back rooms of pubs. It has also long been a preoccupation of Forced Entertainment, a group of six artists who have been producing experimental theatre, durational performance and playing dress-up on stage since 1984.

The company's latest work, Tomorrow's Parties, explores the possibilities of what happens next with their brand of unsettling storytelling and sparse staging. A garland of light bulbs in primary colours (by lighting designer Francis Stevenson) decorates the back of the stage while the performers stand on a stack of pallet crates. Tonight's performers, Cathy Naden and Richard Lowdon, are alternating throughout the show's tour with Forced Entertainment's three other core members. The pair are dressed in artists' civvies of rumpled button-downs and sensible shoes. It's so minimal you can almost feel the autumnal breeze from the back of Contact's Space 1.

Naden and Lowdon take turns to describe, often in fanciful detail, what will happen in the future. Possibilities include a society where everybody carries a suicide pill just in case they want to end it all or one where we will all need to take out an insurance policy to pop to the shops. The two actors have an easy rapport, which is equally easy to watch. Tomorrow's Parties is partially scripted, but feels more like a conversation – a surreal conversation musing on humans marrying animals or our escape to another planet, but still a conversation.

Devised by Forced Entertainment at their rehearsal space in Sheffield and directed by founding member Tim Etchells, Tomorrow's Parties is co-produced by six European theatres. It lacks the physicality of other works from their 29 year back catalogue, such as The World in Pictures, a 2006 theatrical retelling of mankind's history featuring cavemen in wigs, sequinned gowns and snow. Also missing is the emotional intensity of a work like Exquisite Pain (2005), in which seated performers take turns to read out stories from strangers detailing their greatest suffering.

This production feels like an intimate interlude before Forced Entertainment's next work, That Night Follows Day. Featuring 16 young performers, the piece – still in development – explores how adults shape a child's world through language. However, Tomorrow's Parties still contains many tender and humorous moments during its 75 minutes. It may be sparse and lack resolution or variation, but it encourages the audience to focus on the words, the stories and their poignancy.