For a sub-section of GenX UK arts student, Forced Entertainment was THE current aspirational edgy performance art company. Sophisticated, intellectual and playful their work was equally at home in a contemporary art space as it was in a theatre. Back in the days when Artistic Director Tim Etchells was still giving interviews to undergraduates, my mate and I travelled from Scarborough to Sheffield to address awkward small-town questions about media culture and semiotics to him across a tiny table placed in the centre of Forced Entertainment's rehearsal space. Tim was very patient and generous with his time but towards the end of the interview the company arrived for rehearsal and gathered around the edges of the room. Being on the receiving end of their collective focus charged with earnest urban confidence, their presence felt almost predatory and this helped cement in my mind a kind of fetishisation of the company members. Ice cool, intense with their attitude worn conspicuously, they seemed impervious to your opinion and certainly didn't appear to seek approval. It didn't really matter if you found their work engaging or accessible or not, they believed in themselves and you either came along for the ride or you didn't. As someone whose upbringing involved an indoctrination into the art of people pleasing and who therefore smiles as a defence mechanism, encountering professionals of this nature en masse was a challenge.
Hugo Glendinning's iconic company images that appeared time and time again in key textbooks, academic presentations and on posters at hip small-to medium-sized venues around the land, reinforced their status as idols of the cutting edge arts scene rather than living, breathing humans.
Tonight, 28 years after being simultaneously confused and blown away by Speak Bitterness in my first semester at university, I found myself experiencing a moment of existential recoil as a softer, more relatable Claire Marshall and Richard Lowdon stood before me in the flesh with a quieter gravitas. Attitude has evolved into experience. A long time has passed since I first saw this company live and the mirror keeps reminding me that I have aged, so why does it surprise me that others have done the same? I felt disarmed in a dreamlike state, connected to an earlier, less world-weary version of myself, yet experiencing uncharted territory, a frame of mind which turned out to be entirely appropriate for the show.
The format of Tomorrow's Parties, currently enjoying a two-nighter at Newcastle's Live Theatre, was a simple series of hypotheses about the future of Earth and the life it sustains. Two performers stood facing the audience on a on a raised wooden pallet surrounded by coloured string lights, each taking it in turns to verbally illustrate possibilities of how events might all pan out from here, based on the repeated premise 'In the future, [insert theory here.]' As the pace quickened, so the performers created a growing sense of desperation interspersed with humour and intimate moments, accented by barely perceptible lighting changes which kept the audience engaged in our collective trance.
Technology, politics, climate change, economics and Covid-19 have changed our world so radically and rapidly over the last decade that The Future has become synonymous with dystopia. Gone are the hopeful notions of a clean, convenient technological space age that existed in the '50s and '60s. Now even the most outlandish and hideous vision could conceivably be possible if recent years are anything to go by. As postulated in Tomorrow's Parties we may well now have to bring in draconian medical measures to combat overpopulation. We could live in beautiful domes under the sea hiding from the sun. We could end up farming human meat or be issued with a suicide pill aged 18 to provide us with a gentle way to opt out should be become 'sad or a bit bored.' Why not, when right here and now in the real 'post-truth' world, large groups of people genuinely believe that Hilary Clinton was running a paedophile network from the non-existent basement of a pizza shop as part of a vast conspiracy network of myths that involve toxic airline vapour trails, flat earth theories and the descent of lizards from outer space? Why not, when thanks to his decisions, a UK government minister can send thousands of pensioners to their deaths through Covid-19 in care homes, have various personal scandals hit the headlines and still nearly win one of the nation's most watched TV popularity contests?
The sheer number of the performer's prophesies echoed the fragmentation and volume of voices on social media. Sometimes they sounded confident in their declarations, sometimes moved, sometimes as if they were delivering a sales pitch. Online everyone has their own hot take and it's sometimes challenging to find meaning in a world with fewer certainties. Will our children die owing to climate change? Will AI take over the world? Here the company crafted information overwhelm into hypnosis. Many of the visions involved scenarios -albeit taken to the extreme- that are already in progress such as the mass development of eating disorders. There was a plausible nugget of truth within each vision to the extent that I could recognise my own current actions and decisions and mentally extrapolate events playing out given the trajectory they have triggered. It served as a warning.
It occurred to me that once upon a time Forced Entertainment's performers seemed intimidating and the world generally seemed unthreatening but now things are the other way around. I preferred the first version.
I love work of this nature that requires some degree of mental interaction from the audience to complete the circle so that we have to finish making the meaning ourselves. Completing the circle is the closest I get to making art at the moment. It's also the best understanding I have of what meditation is - being totally present and simultaneously aware of my outer senses and inner stream of consciousness. I go to shows like this to think and have ideas - an experience I never get from straight plays when I know what the format is and when to clap, laugh and buy drinks. I want to be surprised, inspired and challenged in a way that doesn't always involve a plot.
Northern Stage used to be the regional host for Forced Entertainment's work so it surprised me to find the show taking place at Live Theatre. I wonder how far Live will stray from its roots of creating solid local plays for local people? For a while Newcastle's theatre scene seems to have foregrounded a hundred different ways to present a well crafted play supported by a number of excellent venue-led initiatives championing new writing. Smaller plays for a hipster tribe at Alphabetti, sumptuous plays foregrounding a social agenda at Northern Stage and plays featuring ex-Coronation Street actors at the Theatre Royal. Of course that is a sweeping generalisation, a personal view and clearly there's an audience demand, but I wonder if Newcastle even has an audience left for a different format of work? Theatre doesn't necessarily have to be literature-based or even story-based. Even Baltic seems to have wandered away from its dalliances with live/performance art of late. It could be the marketing (or more likely, funding) but Newcastle's theatre scene currently feels a little homogenous in terms of format and although no longer 'experimental' per se being that it has now fashioned its own genre, a Forced Entertainment show somehow seems much more subversive in Newcastle now than in the 90s. Is that nostalgia speaking? I think in my early 20s I imagined we'd be somewhere radically different to where we are now. The world has changed so dramatically and to be honest with the odd exception, including the forward-looking GIFT Festival, I'm not convinced that our region's theatre has kept pace. Perhaps we are now taking much needed comfort in the familiar ritual of 'the play'? Tonight the auditorium was around half full for this company with a well established international profile. I wonder is this an audience development or a marketing issue or something else? Interdisciplinary artist Nigel Charnock was showered with roses at a packed Gulbenkian Theatre (formerly the small scale experimental part of the Newcastle Playhouse) in '97.
I forgot what epic feats of endurance Forced Entertainment shows are for the performers. A two-hander of 1hr 20mins is a lot to perfect when the dialogue is concept rather than plot driven. In 2010 I devised a show which was a co-production between Stockton ARC, Berwick Maltings and Theatre Royal Newcastle's Learning Space and The Maltings' Artistic Director Miles Gregory commented that the piece was 'very Forced Ents.' That was one of the biggest compliments that he could have paid our emerging company and they were certainly a huge influence in my arts education. From the quality of tonight's show I would still very much view the company's work as a standard of merit. I enjoyed inhabiting the hypnotic world created by Forced Entertainment this evening. It was fitting that the show closed with a perception of time. It's both a heartbeat and a lifetime since I first encountered this company. We're all living a huge fever dream really.