Drama: Forced Entertainment

In my first few weeks at college, during 1 out of 3 of my drama lessons, we've been working on the first of two modern practitioners who we'll be performing in the style of for our final piece this year; Forced Entertainment (our other option is Kneehigh, who I'll cover like this in a few months once we've studied them a little). Some of you may know a little about Forced Ent.This post is for you people. Those who don't, I'm afraid this is not going to make a whole lot of sense, as it's my personal reaction.

That reaction can be summarised with a few words: Good God they frustrate me! That really gets across my feelings pretty well, but doesn't make much of a blog post, which is obviously what you're here for. What might make it a little more interesting would be my justification for my rage at this bloody theatre group. Here goes.

First of all, Forced Entertainment's intention to anger, perplex, annoy and enrage the audience - which admittedly has worked well on me - takes the concept of theatre and completely flips it on its head, for no clear reason other than sheer bloody-minded self-indulgence. Why do we produce theatre? We produce theatre so as to entertain an audience, be that through vulgar humour, thrilling action, moving emotion, or whatever floats your particular target audience's boat. Why is this? Because that sells tickets. Asking why beyond that is pretentious; purpose cannot necessarily be clearly defined in most cases, but this particular truth is self-evident. The purpose - nay, the very definition of a theatre performance is a show that amuses and entertains an audience, in such a way that they want to see more, and feel like the money that they have paid for tickets is well-spent.

It is not to make the actors feel like they have probed some new boundaries, or done something clever. That is just being selfish; nothing more or less. It is smart-arsey in the extreme. "Hey, look, theatre critics! We've got a woman in a gorilla suit who never talks except to tell the audience that she hopes they're thinking about fucking her!" Well bloody done; genius, I'm sure. No doubt you're sat thinking that a nymphomaniac gorilla could actually be quite amusing. It is, until she goes into detail about exactly how you might fuck her. At that point it's just uncomfortable and embarassing.

I think you probably get the gist of my complaints. It is all very well to say that Forced Entertainment produces challenging and exciting theatre that really pushes the boundaries. Hell, I won't deny it; I spent 5 or 6 weeks thinking that their shows sounded challenging and exciting. But after watching first 25 minutes of Speak Bitterness, and then an hour and a half of Bloody Mess (including the nymphorilla), and enjoying maybe 10 minutes out of the lot, I lost that excitement and it was replaced with a degree of contempt and of anger at mutilating the art that I love beyond recognition.