One of life's brighter days

I have an interview with Tim Etchells in The Stage this week. Haven't seen it yet, but when I do I'll post it up here - should be later today. Might even get round to posting some thoughts on Spectacular, which I saw last Thursday at the Riverside, by the weekend.
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Exploring Existence

Forced Entertainment’s previous production The World in Pictures – a brisk and brusque retelling of history in its entirety – glosses over the major events of the past few decades in a rattle of et ceteras and blah, blah, blahs. “This stuff,” explains Terry O’Connor to the audience, “is stuff that you know anyway. Since you all lived through it, we can afford to go quickly.”

It is an intriguing but loving dismissal of the present from the Sheffield-based collective, who for almost 25 years have remained utterly fixated by the messy complexities of contemporary existence. Under the artistic direction of Tim Etchells the company have always aimed to dissect the act of living as it is right here, right now, with all its postmodern and existential trappings. Neat facts and tidy narratives simply don’t tell the whole story.

“When you go twenty-four, twenty-five years, as we have done,” says Etchells, “it becomes clear that you’re circling various topics and chasing things. You do it one way and then you go back a few years later and do it another way. Nothing’s final, is it?”

No surprises, then, that their new show Spectacular, a two-hander around death that receives its UK premiere recently at the Warwick Arts Centre, resuscitates some recurring motifs. Followers of the company will recognize the skeleton costume and enacted deaths, both of which have cropped up intermittently since 1986. “In some ways it’s a distillation or pushing on of a set of things that have been in the work for some time. I’m not obsessive that things are brand new.”

Despite this assertion, Forced Entertainment has never been content to settle for safe regurgitation of endlessly similar products. In treating theatre as a question posed, they have remained perched on the form’s edges, picking at its seams and pushing its limits.

Formed in 1984 by a group of Exeter University graduates, the experimental outfit now comprises of a core of six artists – Robin Arthur, Ricard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Etchells. In two and a half decades, the group have created an expansive and multifarious canon of over 50 projects, spanning theatre, visual art, film, text and digital media.

Throughout the eighties, the company’s work was characterised by a desperate, riotous freneticism, playing on the conflict between Hollywood adrenaline and the desolation of Thatcher’s Britain. Influences such as Impact Theatre and Pina Bausch combined as minimalist choreography gave way to ragged, visceral scores populated with kidnappings, cowboys and Elvis impersonators.

“Maybe at one point we were governed by this idea that a show ought to be X, Y and Z,” Etchells admits, “It ought to have some running around, it ought to have some music – and that was what we did. Over the years, that sense of what a show might be has loosened. We became more interested in liveness and in contact with the audience, flirting with the possibilities of having a hundred, two hundred or three hundred people sat watching.”

Out of the relative comfort of the nineties grew a more minimal style of work. Speak Bitterness, first performed in 1994, consisted of a row of seven suited performers continuously confessing sins over six hours, from eating the last biscuit, to forgery and fraud, to genocide.

“Everyone was used to us putting on mad costumes and wrecking everything about the stage, covered in beer – that was normal. When we came out and sat down to chat, that was surprising, because nobody really anticipated the work would go in that direction.”

Since then, their performances have often explored the failure of theatre itself. First Night presented an am-dram vaudevillian disaster of fixed smiles and missed cues, while 2005’s Bloody Mess collapsed inwards under clashing genres and a menagerie of theatrical personas – actresses, clowns, roadies and a woman in a gorilla suit – wrestling for centre stage status.

Within all this lurks a dark, ambiguous comedy. “There’s always been an absurd, playful edge to the work, even when it’s trying to be serious. I think our influences or reference points are half from art and theatre and half from popular entertainment – from Tommy Cooper or Morecombe and Wise, from stand-up or amateur dramatics. We always love to mix things up.”

With their hunger for experimentation and reinvention, Forced Entertainment has become staple fare in academic circles.

In 1999, the company received funding for the development of educational resources, which Etchells feels has added accessibility to the work. However, through their risky interrogation of form, the company remain well beyond mainstream popularity.

“Britain still seems very closed in comparison to mainland Europe. By persistence we’ve got a place that we’re allowed to occupy, but it still feels slightly grudging – not in terms of funding, but in a general sense of the cultural air. If you want to do anything interesting, you have to make space for it yourselves.”

Having already attempted to rewrite history and reshape geography, to confess the world’s sins, ask all its questions and tell all its stories, once cannot help but wonder the sort of space they’ll need. As Etchells has said in the past: “The stage is too small; it isn’t the whole world.”