forced entertainment

Bloody Mess
Information pack
Bloody Mess information pack page 2
Forced Entertainment are an ensemble of artists who have been working together since 1984
producing new works in theatre and performance as well as projects in digital media, video and installation.
Led by Artistic Director Tim Etchells, the company continually strives to fnd new performance and
theatre forms with which to describe contemporary urban life. Widely acclaimed in the UK and Europe,
the groups recent work explores ideas of identity, language, theatricality, love, cities and memory.
Performers
Robin Arthur
Davis Freeman
Wendy Houstoun
Jerry Killick
Richard Lowdon
Forced Entertai nment i s regul arl y funded by Arts Counci l Engl and and Sheffi el d Ci ty Counci l . Forced
Entertai nment Ltd i s a regi stered chari ty ( 1 049574) VAT number ( 457864009) .
Claire Marshall
Cathy Naden
Terry OConnor
Bruno Roubicek
John Rowley
Direction
Tim Etchells
Text
Tim Etchells and the company
Design
Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design
Nigel Edwards
Photography
Hugo Glendining
Introduction
A large print version of this pack is available on request, please contact:
fe@forcedentertainment.com
Bloody Mess was co-produced by Festival THEATERFORMEN (Hannover), KunstenFESTIVALdesArts (Brussels),
Rotterdamse Schouwburg (Rotterdam), Les Spectacles vivants Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Wiener
Festwochen (Vienna). It was also supported by LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre) and Nuffield
Theatre (Lancaster). Work-in-progress performances were co-produced by SpielArt Festival (Munich).
Bloody Mess information pack 2004. This information pack is protected by copyright laws, and may not
be republished, distributed, displayed or otherwise exploited in any manner without express prior written
permission of Forced Entertainment.
Little to Regret
There has never been a company quite like Forced Entertainment. Even the company name is a
provocation, raising more questions than it answers. All theatre companies are, of course, unique
in their own way, but Forced Entertainment is more distinctive than most. The unimaginative have
sometimes labeled it an English Wooster Group, but it is so much more than a pale imitation of
something else and so much more than just a theatre company.
Since its very first show, Jessica in the Room of Lights (1984), which told of the failed romance of
a cinema usherette in several contradictory versions, it was clear that Forced Entertainment was
testing both the boundaries and possibilities of theatre, shifting predictable dramatic structures and
upsetting expectations. Since then the company has created a vast body of work - over 50 different
projects - that encompasses short and durational performances for theatres and art galleries as well
as installation, video, internet and work for CD-ROM.
These works are enormously diverse spanning shows such as First Night and Showtime that play
with the conventions of theatre itself, through to the six-hour Quizoola! that takes the form of a
demented pub quiz in which the more you search for knowledge the more elusive it becomes, or the
24-hour bedtime story Who Can Sing a Song to Unfrighten Me? a performance of such length that it
becomes a journey into the unknown for both performers and audience. Some projects are ongoing
such as the Institute of Failure, an Internet project with occasional live presentations dedicated to the
documentation of failure in human endeavour.
For its many fans across the world Forced Entertainment has become an addiction; for the company
members - an ensemble in the truest sense - it is a way of life. The lives of the performers, family,
friends regularly feed into the work that constantly plays with the lines between fact and fiction,
autobiography and lies, questions and answers, acting and real life.
It was back in the early 1980s when Britain was in the full grip of an economic recession that a group
of Exeter university graduates led by Tim Etchells moved to Sheffield, a former steel town where the
living was cheap enough to encourage all sorts of cultural activity. In Sheffield in the mid-eighties
everyone was in a band.
If the core members of Forced Entertainment had been born just five years later they might well have
made film or video, but theatre was the cheaper option. So they took the language of late night TV
movies, graffiti, over-heard conversations on busses, the songs that you keep replaying in your head
and refashioned the fragments into theatrical form in shows that offered a panicky, roller coaster ride
through urban Britain.
It was as if they had discovered a place to put all the bits inside our heads that we dont know what to
do, all those jumbled images from endlessly flickering TVs and late night journeys to nowhere in the
car: Forced Entertainment shows were full of drunken angels in cardboard crowns, menacing thugs
on wet streets, bad wigs, Elvis Presley impersonators, wild parties that turn sad as the clock ticks
towards another grey dawn. When some theatre critics, born and bred on text heavy, well-made plays
complained that they couldnt understand what was going on in Forced Entertainment shows, Etchells
retorted, quite correctly, that they could be easily understood by anyone brought up in a house where
the TV was always on.
Bloody Mess information pack page 3
Bloody Mess, the latest show, is the ultimate title for a company that has always been keen to stage
collisions between the chaos of contemporary life with the fixed traditions of theatrical convention.
In First Night (2001) real life crossed the footlights as the performers desire to please the audience
breaks down and turns into a disastrous vaudevillian nightmare. Disco Relax (2000) takes place
amid the lurex and tinsel of a disco pub where prejudices and aggression pour forth like vomit, a
never-ending disaster movie in which nobody present realises that they are the catastrophe. Nobody
does 3am and chaos and puke and tears and alcohol with quite such precise and exquisite control
as Forced Entertainment. Nobody does it with such viciousness and such tenderness. This tightly
choreographed shambles plays out the rituals that we create to survive and the stories we spin to
keep ourselves awake in the dying hours. They are full of glycerin tears, toy guns that suddenly fire
live bullets and drunken children gleefully raiding the dressing up box.
Back in 1986 the company produced a beautiful, tacky and tender show called 200% and Bloody
Thirsty, in which three drunks wearing jumble sale outfits enacted the events surrounding the death
of a friend while watched over by angels on video monitors. As touching as a nativity play and as
bleak as anything by Beckett, 200% and Bloody Thirsty did not please all British critics, one of them
declaring: The whole performance is totally out of controlthere is little to enjoy and much to
regret. Five years later the company took the phrase and used as the final words of another show,
Marina and Lee. Because Forced Entertainment is always very much in control, there is always much
to enjoy and little to regret.
Lyn Gardner, 2004.
Lyn Gardner is a theatre critic for The Guardian. The text above was written for the Wiener Festwochen Bloody Mess
programme.
Bloody Mess information pack page 4
This year is Forced Entertainments 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 Entertainments
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 were 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.
Bloody Mess information pack page 5
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, thats 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 its not worth it.
But we dont. When clowns go bad its 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.
Geoff Willcocks, 2004.
Geoff Willcocks is Head of the Department of Performing
Arts at Coventry University. The text above was originally
written for the Forced Entertainment website.
When Clowns Go Bad
Bloody Mess information pack page 6
In some of the advance publicity materials for Bloody
Mess you talk describe the title as being something
of a manifesto can you explain?
We came up with the title Bloody Mess long before wed
really started work on the piece, and it started for us as a
way of defining what our ambitions for the new piece might
be. Wed gotten frustrated with some of the tactics that we
had been employing on a regular basis in the more recent
work, and I suppose there were a number of strategies that
we were coming back to fairly often. In particular I think
there was a tendency in work like The Travels, The Voices and
even First Night to define what was happening on stage by a
single rule or activity, and to go for a visual or physical state
that was very simple and ordered and structured, classically
a line of people at the front who talk to the audience, or
a row of people sitting behind tables and speaking to the
audience, or a single space on stage where people would go
to talk (in The Voices); pieces that were quite sparse, strict
and stripped down.
Many of those were very exciting and successful pieces for us
but I think we began to think about and yearn for something
else, and began thinking about work that wed made ten or
more years ago where the aesthetic was much more jumbled,
and where the work was much more physical. I think there
has been in the last five years or more a drop off in activity
in the shows, and we were curious what would happen if we
tried to work in a way that was much more physical and
visual and bring things into a slightly more chaotic mode.
So Bloody Mess as a title was a kind of manifesto, it was
like saying, OK then, lets make some noise, lets make
something that bursts out of the categories that weve been
used to dealing with.
Can you talk a little about the process of making
this performance was it different from Forced
Entertainments usual way of working?
In a way it was a very typical process for us, we started out
with a very formal constraint; we wanted to make things
that were more physical and visual, and we certainly didnt
want to end up all stood in a line at the front, at least not
for any length of time. We didnt really have much in the
way of content or text or imagery in the very beginning,
which is pretty usual. We started in the studio with a small
group, talking about ambitions for the piece and what we
might want and how it might work, and then slowly began
to uncover some of the things that would become clues, or
central planks of the piece as it eventually emerged. We
didnt have a very clear idea at the beginning at all beyond
this idea to make something more chaotic and probably
more visual and physical.
There were two questions that we asked ourselves quite
often in the early stages of the piece as it was developing.
One was, If we werent allowed to talk at this point in the
performance what would we do? I think that was a way
of trying to persuade ourselves to make work that was
based around action or the choreographic rather than the
textual. The other question we asked a lot was, What else
can we have? or Why do these things have to collapse
down into one thing? We were trying to keep ourselves
on our toes about having disconnection, having characters
or strands in the work that were there to collide with each
other rather than to all become the same thing. Theres
a contrast between this and a show like First Night, where
all the performers are in the same boat and have the same
understanding at the outset of the situation and what theyre
there to do. It may be going very badly, it might be quite a
strange show, but the performers in First Night all seem to
think theyre in some kind of insane vaudeville routine, that
its going rather badly and that the audience are up against
them in some way, and everything in the piece proceeds
from that very basic set of assumptions. We were interested
in Bloody Mess to make something that was more diverse, if
you asked each individual on stage what was going on they
might each give a different answer. Theres no particular
shared understanding in Bloody Mess, most of the personas
there seem to have quite a different idea of what the evening
is meant to be and what would be a good outcome, which is
what we wanted.
So the process was very much about these kinds of
discussions about disconnection, about having more
different things rather than making everything the same,
about the physical and visual rather than the language-
based. We also had discussions about music, about how to
use music, about whether it was possible even to use music
anymore. Again, another tendency in recent years is that
theres been less and less music in the pieces. This time
we were saying, What happens now if we go back to that
language? What can we do with it now that we wouldnt
have been interested to or dared to do before?
At the same time as these discussions there were the usual
rather random set of improvisings, and attempts to find things
for people to do. In Bloody Mess this was very definitely a
process of identifying over a course of time a position or a
role for each individual, and because the performers werent
all there at the start (we had five at the beginning and then
slowly we added another two, then another two came and
then finally one more) it meant that the piece would get to
a certain point and then wed have to deal with the fact that
Interview with Tim Etchells
Bloody Mess information pack page 7
two more people needed to be there, and then two more,
and then another, so in a way the economy of the piece was
constantly subjected to the shock of new input and new
presences. As roles were identified, you could say, Richard
and Robin are these heavy metal roadie guys, so thats them
done, we know what they are, and we could move on and
talk about what Terry was doing, or what Cathy or Claire
were doing.
Its interesting that the first really useful thing that we got was
this scene or fragment involving five people, which came out
of a discussion about using music. There was a discussion
about how we were using music, if it was possible to use
music (again, this quite theoretical kind of conversation),
and if one group of people were doing one thing to the
music, could someone else be doing something else entirely
unrelated? We were talking in rehearsals one day and just
as a stupid example of that I was running through this idea
that Richard and Robin would come on and they would have
a record player, and they would plug the record player in and
they would put on a record and dance, heavy metal style, to
Born to be Wild. Then meanwhile, at the same time, Claire
would wear the gorilla suit and do whatever, Cathy would lie
on the floor in the middle and be apparently dead, and Terry
would weep and wail and grieve about that. So in a way
we were asking, can you have these three separate islands
of activity (Richard and Robin, Terry and Cathy, and Claire)
at once? And we did that one day in the studio and it was
absolutely fantastic. I was looking from the boys; to Terry and
Cathy doing this grieving thing; to Claire putting on a gorilla
suit and then just sitting there as the gorilla, and I suppose
what I liked very much was the absolute unreadability of it.
I would go from one thing to another to another to another
and I could never figure out how to make sense of this
combination. I think that experience, which came about not
randomly but quite by chance, was then very key to the kind
of pleasure that one was seeking in Bloody Mess and the kind
of dynamic of watching that we were trying to encourage
or explore, so that very often in the piece youre faced with
completely unresolvable combinations of things.
Can you talk a little about the experience of working
with different people on the project?
It was definitely a choice from us that we wanted to work
with a larger group and wanted (in this case) ten performers.
I think one of the reasons for wanting more people is that
theres a feeling for us that when theres a smaller group you
get very wrapped up in the psychology of the interactions, or
in the narrative reasons why all these people are together.
Its possible to tell a story about a group of three or five
or seven people even, but by the time you get up to ten or
more your brain doesnt really do the same thing with that
as a number and youre faced more with just a large group
of people, you dont necessarily make these narrative jumps
about them. And that was one reason; we wanted to free
ourselves from these constraints of narrative or psychology,
or to approach those things from a different angle.
We were also interested to work with people whose
background was more in dance or physical performance work,
so two of the people who came on board (Davis Freeman and
Wendy Houstoun) both come more out of a dance theatre
/ experimental dance background. Wendys made a lot of
her own projects as a dancer and choreographer shes also
worked a lot with DV8, particularly the early shows of theirs.
Davis has worked with Meg Stuart in Alibi, which I was also
involved in, an extremely physical and visual dance piece,
and has created a lot of his own work, which combines image
and text and often video as well. The other new performer
we worked with, Bruno Roubicek, also has a quite physical /
visual background as a performer, so those three joined the
more or less established team of the five core company plus
John Rowley and Jerry Killick, who weve worked with a lot
over the last three or four years. The attempt there was to
bring in different approaches and sets of skills, and I think in
the end the piece benefits a lot from having those different
inputs.
This performance seems to be more unashamedly
visual/theatrical and especially physical than other
recent projects can you talk about these qualities
and why they seemed important for Bloody Mess?
One of the things we were interested in doing was chasing
the meaning that comes out of the visual or the collage or
physicality, and I think its a really important thing in Bloody
Mess that everybody in it is intensely physically committed
to and engaged with what theyre doing. Theres this kind
of preposterous joy I think, watching Richard and Robin
doing this heavy metal dancing, which they do periodically
throughout the piece. Its so unashamed, these two
forty year old guys rocking out and they dont care whos
watching, they think its the best thing in the world to dance
like that to those songs, and its very naked, very generous,
and physically very committed; theres no distance, theyre
right in there. Its the same with almost every other figure
on the stage, whether its the clowns, John and Bruno, in
this awful fight that takes over the whole piece at a certain
point, or whether its Jerry and Davis dancing with the stars
throughout the whole performance more or less, or Terrys
super-passionate grieving routine/MTV video dancing, or
the cheerleading of Wendy. Even the gorilla (Claire dashing
about like a mad thing in the gorilla costume) or Cathy laying
on the floor as the corpse, even these things have a physical
commitment, so first comes the image and the doing of the
thing, and everything else follows from that. I think that puts
you in a very different place, both as a performer, and as a
Bloody Mess information pack page 8
spectator. You get this excess of physical commitment, rather
than the more dry commitment you get from people who are
talking all the time, and I think we were very interested in
that something about energy really, and about bodies. I
do think that personally the work that Ive done with Meg
Stuart (choreographer) has been pretty important to me and
made me think back to the body and what comes out of the
body in terms of meaning, and a certain kind of strength and
vibrancy.
Also, were really thinking a lot in this piece about pleasure;
about the pleasure of watching, and about visual pleasure,
physical pleasure, and oral pleasure. The piece almost
constantly wants to give you presents; its a very decorative
piece, its busy in every corner of the stage all the time,
theres always something for you to find visually to look at,
its very sensuous. Again, I think the minimalism of a lot of
what weve done in the last few years has been put on pause
(Im not saying we wont go back to it) and were flooding
the stage with physicality, with visuals, with details, which is
really what we were in the mood to make at this point.
The company has a reputation for performances
that are quite confrontational with the audience or
which challenge the relation and expectations of
the audience how does Bloody Mess fit into this
trend?
In a way the big comparison between this show and another is
between Bloody Mess and the last piece we made for middle
scale venues, which was First Night. First Night was the
first attempt by us to make something that went into larger
(300+ seats) auditoriums and wanted to be there, which
tried to take advantage of a bigger stage space, and to play
a more theatrical and visual kind of game. I think it succeeds
in that and one of the things which it chooses as a decision
is to really question what this whole theatrical framework
is about, and to push at that as many of our pieces have
done in the past and in that process it ends up (playfully)
giving the audience quite a hard time. The piece focuses in
some ways on, What did you want to see, as an audience
member? and, Youre making us do things, and develops
all this awkwardness and bad feeling about the expectations
of entertainment that go with theatre or vaudeville it really
cracks that open and lets the bad blood flow out. First Night
is really a comedy about those issues the relation between
the performer and the audience, the expectation of theatre
(what the fuck is it?). First Night is also extremely worried
and agitated and anxious and theres huge tension in it, its
like the performers are shitting themselves at the sight of
the audience and theres this immense disrespect and fear
and mistrust and aggression that goes between the stage
and the audience and back again.
One of the really big differences with Bloody Mess is that
its got this amazing devil-may-care, quite generous attitude.
In many ways the performance is crazy, almost off the rails
in parts, but nobody on stage seems overtly worried about
that. Everybody on stage seems to think that the whole
thing is quite good, that the audience are probably loving it
and that the audience are probably great; its very warm in
a strange way, for something thats also so messed up. One
of the things that I think is really important about Bloody
Mess is that it has this feeling of playfulness and warmth,
and a kind of generosity. I think the audience is invited to
laugh at and negotiate the craziness and disconnection
thats happening on stage, but its not ever made to feel
responsible for causing this or that theres a problem with
the audience. In First Night in a certain sense the problem is
with the audience, while in Bloody Mess the problem is with
the other people on stage theres so much disagreement
on stage that theres not really any energy left to pick a fight
with the audience, theyre too busy fighting with each other.
The interesting thing about Bloody Mess is that its not so
much about fighting as about the way that all these people
on stage find these playful ways to interrupt and coexist and
mutate what theyre doing to meet or not quite meet what
the others are doing, so perhaps its a show more about
this playful osmotic meeting or blurring together/colliding,
rather than about straightforward fighting, although there is
plenty of fighting as well.
Press Quotes
A wonderfully playful theatrical game on the nature of illusion, narrative and laughter... It is
ridiculously good.
THE GUARDAIN (UK)
Lashings of deceptively chaotic comedy... This is theatre as heavy-metal road accident.
THE TIMES (UK)
A get-down-and-get-dirty, thrilling, horrible, fantastic, cathartic, wet and sticky two hours.
TOTAL THEATRE (UK)
What is refreshing about Forced Entertainment is that, even after all this time, it is playing with
theatresearching for new metaphors.
NEW STATESMAN (UK)
Uncompromising, thought-provoking and gloriously silly - this is sheer theatrical perfection.
THE STAGE (UK)
Forced Entertainment tackle life, the universe and everything in their current extravaganza.

FINANCIAL TIMES (UK)

This is theatre turned inside out.
SUNDAY TIMES (UK)
Britains finest experimental theatre company at the top of their game. Bloody brilliant.
CITY LIFE (UK) Winner of City Lifes Theatre Performance of the Year 2004
Extremely entertaining.
LE MONDE (France)
British anarchism at its best.
DIE PRESSE (Austria)
Black humour and wonderful understatement fighting against the conventions of theatre.
SALZBURGER NACHRICHTEN (Austria)
How was the show? - It was great Forced Entertainment have cleaned up effortlessly. Fantastic.
DER STANDARD (Austria)
Forced Entertainment are back: The junkies get their yearly fix and (as every year) a few new people
will catch the bug of this incomparable, internationally leading experimental group.
KURIER (Germany)
The entertainment factor is high, but the humour stems from an absurdity which is deeply tragic
Witty, dark and thought provoking.
DAGSAVISEN (Norway)
Savagely and hilariously satirises theatrical pretension.
THE AGE (Australia)
Bloody Mess information pack page 9
Resources
Bloody Mess information pack page 10
Website - www.forcedentertainment.com
Here you can find:
An archive of all the companys projects, illustrated with stunning photographs by Hugo
Glendinning, video interviews, programme notes essays and other fragments.
Full details of all touring activity, including links to online booking where available.
Links to online resources including free downloadable packs and articles about the
company.
Chance to sign up to our free mailing list to keep you informed of all Forced Entertainment
news.
Online Shop - www.forcedentertainment.com/shop
Peruse our virtual shelves to order books, DVDs and other resources including:
Research Pack
Our Research Pack contains over 100 pages of articles, reviews, project information and notes
on aspects of the making process. It is an invaluable resource for people with an academic
interest in the company.
Performance DVDs and texts
High quality multi-camera performance documentation of most of Forced Entertainments
shows from the past 25 years and texts.
Making Performance
A 30-minute DVD exploring the companys working process.
Certain Fragments
Contemporary Performance & Forced Entertainment - Tim Etchells
An extraordinary exploration of what lies at the heart of contemporary theatre. Written by Tim
Etchells, his unique and provocative voice shifts from intimate anecdote to critical analysis
and back again to investigate the processes of devising performance, the role of writing in an
intedisciplinary theatre, and the influence of the city on contemporary art practice.
British Library Sound Archive - www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/drama
The Forced Entertainment Collection at the British Library Sound Archive contains never seen
before rehearsal footage, a complete collection of our performance DVDs and texts alongside
other contemporary performance documentation. Access is free of but you will need to make
an appointment, please contact them on +44 (0)20 7412 7447 or email NSA-drama@bl.uk.
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