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Press

"A get-down-and-get- dirty, thrilling, horrible, fantastic, cathartic, wet and sticky two hours."
Total Theatre

“A wonderfully playful theatrical game on the nature of illusion, narrative and laughter... It is ridiculously good.****”
The Guardian

“This is theatre turned inside out.****”
Sunday Times

“Britain’s finest experimental theatre company… at the top of their game. Bloody brilliant.”
City Life. Winner of City Life’s Theatre Performance of the Year 2004

“Lashings of deceptively chaotic comedy... This is theatre as heavy-metal road accident. ****"
The Times

 “What is refreshing about Forced Entertainment is that, even after all this time, it is playing with theatre…searching for new metaphors.”
New Statesman

“Uncompromising, thought-provoking and gloriously silly - this is sheer theatrical perfection.”
The Stage

“Forced Entertainment tackle life, the universe and everything in their current extravaganza. ****”
Financial Times

 “Extremely entertaining.”
Le Monde

“British anarchism at its best.”
Die Presse

Programme notes and essays

Read the introductory programme note for Bloody Mess by Forced Entertainment’s Artistic Director Tim Etchells here.

A: Its important to cry.
B: No it isn’t. Its more important to laugh.
(Bloody Mess)

I think, maybe, we have got closer than ever before to a certain dream – that of making a work which on the surface seems quite out of control and cannot be successfully turned into a story and yet, at the same time functions effectively at every level.

We’re following the strict, even minimalist approaches of recent projects from Dirty Work to First Night and The Travels with a project that’s emphatically more layered. Definitely and proudly theatrical, Bloody Mess is composed in a spirit more akin to that of painting, choreography or even late-night channel hopping. It’s about the collision of different worlds and personas – collisions at which sparks fly, collisions that can be both comical and disturbing.

Bloody Mess has been made as part of the company’s 20th Birthday celebrations and it seems like a very appropriate project at this point in time. For us, the mess and its structured exuberance is something of a manifesto; an insistence that theatre can be more than drab story or literary rhetoric, that its heart lies in play, in liveness and in the event.

Something happens. Something unfolds. And you’re there to join the dots and enjoy.

Tim Etchells
Sheffield 2004

You can read a birthday letter to Forced Entertainment from Frie Leysen of KunstenFESTIVALDesArts on the occasion of their 20^th birthday used in the Bloody Mess programme here.

Dear Forced Entertainment (all grown up now after 20 years?), I’d like to take this opportunity of wishing you a very happy birthday. All of us at the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts and your co-producers and presenters in Europe and elsewhere feel extremely privileged and very honoured that you will be sharing your birthday with us.

This year sees a book being published to mark your anniversary (Not Even a Game Anymore)  with in-depth analyses and studies of your work, but I’m going to leave the serious stuff to everyone else. I’m simply a huge fan of yours, and that is what I want to write about here.

You have brought six different productions to Brussels so far, and are bringing another three with you this year. It goes without saying that I really love your work, and I’m not alone. In no time at all you’ve created an enthusiastic, curious and adoring audience for yourselves here. Why is that? What is so special about you?

Well, your company has become a key player in contemporary European theatre. Like Christoph Marthaler and William Kentridge, you have changed theatre’s form; challenged its acting, presentation, representation and content. But more significantly you have made theatre human again. You’ve introduced humanity, the beauty of human vulnerability and awkwardness, the Humana Fragilita, bringing plenty of generosity and humour to a theatre that, all too often in recent years, has been hiding behind a mask of intellectualism and cynicism. Indeed, your theatre shows us the grandeur of being small, of admitting how imperfect and fragile, as well as how derisory we all are, even as we try to pretend that we’re not, attempting to succeed and be masters of our own little universes. Our doubts and failures and all the feelings that go with them become real and very recognisable in your work.

Your art is not just about acting or performing, it’s about being yourself. Your art is not superficial.

The quality and strength of Forced Entertainment lies in the confrontation and collaboration of very strong individual personalities, demanding for yourself and for everyone else.

You take a very acerbic look at the mechanisms of human behaviour and offer an uncompromising critique of our society. But you include yourself in the society you are critiquing, saying ‘we are’ (a little bit) ridiculous, not ‘you are’. Your art offers a rare combination of fierce intellect and childish wonderment. I don’t know why, but something JM Barrie wrote in Peter Pan makes me think of your theatre, of the function you give the actor to soothe the restless children-spectators that we are.

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

We’re bombarded with stories every day, inundated with words and images in the street, on the news, in soaps, thrillers and reality TV. A whole jumble of snatches of life, of destinies held up to be either embellished or vilified, impregnates our unconscious in a chaotic and subliminal way. You keep an eye out for us. You’re able instantly to improvise a sudden thought about the world, catch the train of someone’s thought, sparking a shriek of laughter or a throat dry with anxiety. You’re so quick at capturing everything and (re)inventing it all. Jubilantly. The pleasure and fun you have when creating your work is catching. You seem to read the map of people’s minds so well. On stage, you chart the hidden parts of our psyches and in your enactment they become fascinating, beautifully clear and at the same time confused, constantly on the move.

It’s as if you and Tim are growing up again alongside Tim’s son Miles and the other children born to the people in the group, re-discovering the world through their eyes, yet retaining your adult knowledge and critical sense. Talking about the world in the language of children’s stories; perhaps this is how you have become true storytellers.

I have met you in a variety of places all over the world and during different periods in your lives, sometimes extremely happy ones, sometimes sad, sometimes satisfied, sometimes very in love, sometimes disappointed. But what has often struck me is that you were always really there and available for everybody, sharing as much as you could with local artists and audiences. You have mastered the art of being there like no one else has.

You’re not just generous to others, but you’re also very curious to find out things, to learn from them, always open to discovering new ways of living, thinking and feeling. This openness and curiosity seem to be what drives your work, your permanent inspiration, whether it comes from questions asked by your kids, or comments and reactions to your work from audiences in Beirut or Chicago or Zagreb. And this openness and curiosity would seem to be the best antidotes to arrogance, pretension and indifference. You make people feel valued and interesting, and this is such a precious gift for everyone who has met you.

Thanks for being there, for 20 years.

Frie Leysen
Brussels, April 2004

Read birthday wishes from Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency reproduced in the Bloody Mess programme here.

Happy 20th birthday to Forced Entertainment. They’ve seen off Thatcher, outlasted The Smiths and they’re still as original, as urgent and as fresh as the first time I saw them (Nottingham, 1987).

There are artists working in performance today who weren’t even born when Forced Entertainment started out, and for many of them – as for the generations in between – the company stands out as a pre-eminent influence. From 1987’s drunken odyssey 200% & Bloody Thirsty to 2001’s end-of-the-pier-show First Night, the company’s work has helped to keep the idea of theatre alive and full of possibility. Their work has shaped the ways in which performance practices have evolved in the UK and, at the same time, in projects like Nightwalks (1988) and Imaginary Evidence (2003), the group have pioneered approaches to the new platforms and media offered by the digital era. Wherever we look in contemporary performance we find the stamp of Forced Entertainment. A lot has happened in the 20 years that the members of Forced Entertainment have been working together, and in this time most peoples’ lives have changed – whether culturally, politically, ideologically – almost beyond recognition. For many of us Forced Entertainment have remained a constant and valuable point of reference: their sublimely bleak early works, like 1986’s (Let the Water Run its Course) to the Sea that Made the Promise, took us through Thatcher's hopeless, hideous Britain, and as they reached maturity and expanded their practice into duration and location based work, with projects like the epic game of questions and answers Quizoola! (1996), Forced Entertainment constructed the kind of performance experiences we needed to negotiate the collapses and collisions of facts and fictions in the (new) media world of New Labour and friends.

Setting out in 1984 to make theatre for audiences ‘who grew up with the television always on’, Forced Entertainment have broken the traditions of the site, circumstance, and expectations of theatre, rewriting its rules to reflect the conditions of the contemporary. Shaped as much by art, film and popular culture as by any literary canon, their work has destroyed the pretence of theatre, smashed the languages and codes of its performance and, in works like 1993’s 12am: Awake & Looking Down and 2000’s And on the Thousandth Night…, re-imagined the tales that it can tell.

In 20 years Forced Entertainment have never compromised their integrity and have never been afraid to take risks with projects that take them into new territory or which test new relationships with their audience. Most importantly, perhaps, in works such as their 24-hour long performance Who Can Sing A Song to Unfrighten Me?, they have never stopped asking what the nature and experience of theatre can be. And maybe that’s why in 20 years they have never been invited to the National Theatre, profiled by Michael Billington or nominated for an Olivier Award. Of course, this says much more about the antiquated cultural values of Theatre UK than it does about the significance of Forced Entertainment. Gloriously diverse and defiantly difficult, their body of work is impossible to categorise and consistently groundbreaking. They are one of the most important and influential groups of artists working in the world today, a group who have made, and continue to make, a real difference to the audiences that encounter them and to the forms in which they work.

In 1998 Forced Entertainment invited me to take part in the seminar ‘Theatre, Text, Context’. I spent a lot of time grumbling about the generation gap at the heart of the culture wars in the UK in the 1980s and 90s when questions around who was making art, how they were making it and who they were making it for seemed to be symbolised by the tensions between ‘new’ theatre makers experimenting with forms and content and ‘old’ theatre makers still locked in the literary tradition. In 2004 the ‘new’ still remains suspect to the mainstream and many of the more traditional theatre commentators I despaired of in 1998, who thought Forced Entertainment were ‘just making a mess’, are still with us and still setting the agenda.

It therefore gives me an enormous amount of pleasure to see that Forced Entertainment are marking 20 magnificent years with a work called Bloody Mess. More please.

Lois Keidan
London, April 2004

Geoff Willcocks is Head of Performing Arts at Coventry University.  Read his essay on Bloody Mess written for the Forced Entertainment website here.

When Clowns Go Bad
By Geoff Willcocks

This year is Forced Entertainment’s 20th birthday, but Bloody Mess is not Decade of Forced Entertainment Part II, in that the show is not a retrospective celebration of the past 10 years. However, the performance does have its reverberations, its echoes of past work that momentarily occupy and walk the stage like ghosts, whispers of things that are partially familiar – tawdry animal costumes, death scenes, the line-up, smeared clown make up or the atmosphere and the now distinct hallmark of their work – the challenges that they set us, the audience. Layers of conjoined actions/characters/moments – autonomous but at the same time fused together to create a rich complex of ideas and images - ensure that Bloody Mess contains the essence, the DNA of that which is Forced Entertainment.

For much of last two decades I have watched the work of Forced Entertainment in small scale and some very small scale black box venues where the up close and personal matters. My relationship to their work has been based, in part, on this proximity, on an intimacy created by the fact that the performers look at you and seem to say ‘OK, you can see me, but remember I can see you too’. But, now with Forced Entertainment’s move to explore larger theatre spaces, started with First Night and continued here with Bloody Mess, this relationship has been developed to a new level. Now, the massed ranks of us in the dark are addressed as such – a collective, a society, a world  - and the vast, bare and exposed stage of the Kaai Theatre in Brussels, seemed to amplify this relationship.

But the balance of this charged relationship is something that Forced Entertainment have been committed to exploring, dismantling and reconstructing.  They specialise in beckoning us, those of us in the dark bit, towards them in the lit bit - sometimes they reach out and jab us in the ribs, or goad us – to have a go if we think we’re hard enough. Then they seduce us, shame us, make us pity them, make us laugh, embarrass us, confront us and make us ask ourselves what are we doing here, and then go further to make us ask – what are we doing here – what is our job – out here in the dark. Bloody Mess does all these things. Like First Night, the show is played directly to us.  We witness the chaos of the stage, Bloody Mess is all about chaos, and we are made to feel responsible for the mess. We want to tell the manic cheerleader to shut up so that the clown can finish his story of the universe, you want to give the drenched ‘rock-chick’ a towel and say ‘thanks, that’s enough’ and when the gorilla confronts us with the idea that we are thinking about fucking her, we want to apologise, make our excuses and leave. When two clowns start a fight, we want to say, ‘come on boys, leave it – it’s not worth it’. But we don’t. When clowns go bad it’s best to stay out the way.

Bloody Mess explores chaos, in the same way that Hidden J explored history and guilt or Disco Relax drinking and being drunk. But more that this Bloody Mess it is about failure and specifically the failure of order. Throughout the performance things are begun but are never finished, the performers are frustrated by constant interruptions, distortions and shatterings.  Private acts of weakness and inadequacy are made public  - brought forward, stripped, exposed and waved in our faces.  Little is completed, closed or ended. An attempt to create the perfect silence fails, an actress fails to perform, a set of impressions of explosions are truly awful and at the beginning of the show all the performers tell us how they would like to be seen during the performance - aspirations that are never fulfilled. But, at the same time failure is shown as having its own order, its own internal logical. If the clown had been able to finish his story of the expanding universe, he may well have told us, so the story/theory goes, that at the end of everything, the universe is destined to collapse under its own weight and so everything, ultimately, is doomed to failure, loss and darkness.

Download

You can download an education pack about the show here.