Another Theatre

Sheffield, 1984. Founder members of the group – Robin Arthur, Deborah Chadbourn, Huw Chadbourn, Tim Etchells, Richard Lowdon, Cathy Naden and Susie Williams – were later joined by Terry O’Connor and Claire Marshall. The three years after the group’s formation took Huw and Susie away to their own projects and the subsequent decades brought a steady flow of other collaborators, performers and artists, joining us for one, several or many, many pieces, including Hugo Glendinning, Nigel Edwards, John Avery, Sue Marshall, Tim Hall, Phil Hayes, Wendy Houston, John Rowley, Jerry Killick, Ocean Chillingworth, Nicki Hobday, Seke Chimutengwende, and Tyrone Huggins.

But 40 years is more than some necessarily partial listing of names. 40 years is 40 years working resolutely against the tide in British theatre, sticking out for collective ownership, collective authorship, group work. 40 years of being at sea together in the studio. The strange logic of group-work and collectivity, shared artistic, political and life endeavours. A different politics of creation and of living, working and thinking together.

40 years is a 40 year commitment to specific ways of working in theatre and performance, and at the same time a commitment to a particular understanding of what meaning in this space might be. 40 years committed not to the literary theatre, but instead to a theatre that ascribes meaning to the event itself and to the deep and complex organisation of music, action, text, bodies, presences, energies, temporalities. It is 40 years insisting that form and content are deeply intertwined, that form is content. 40 years insisting that the moment of performance – the fragile dynamism of relation through the slippery passage of time – is the necessary beating heart of the form. 40 years trying to map contemporary experience through the investigative instrument of the rehearsal room. 40 years of trying to make theatre performances that reach out, touch, confuse and entangle the spectator.

It’s 40 years also of searching for our own ways of organising, 40 years in which the management, administration and other structures of the group have been finding their own forms, learning, building, often starting from scratch, working towards ethical and politically sustainable ways of working together, of treating employees, and of working with other organisations. It’s 40 years that was never only about the art, but about the art in a context we were attempting to build.

40 years in search of a theatre that is somehow unresolvable, irreconcilable – where you can’t say from the outset what it’s about and where, even at the end, such aboutness as there might be retains a form of tension, mystery or contradiction. 40 years believing that what you make together, in the room, in the deep dive of the process is richer than what any individual would make alone. 40 years believing that the strength of thing you do in performance comes from the tensions it attempts to contain, the impulses and counter-impulses it accommodates, the different energies and intuitions negotiated by doing, the fact of the work as a product of diverse intentions rather than single authorial intent.

It is 40 years of yells, silences and juxtapositions. 40 years of laughter turning to unease and 40 years of unease turning once again to laughter. 40 years of temporary answers to the questions what can theatre be at this moment, what kind of relation to audience can it have, what kind of relation to meaning can it have? 40 years of audiences. 40 years of conversations after shows. 40 years of whispers, walkouts and applause. 40 years of stretching, slowing and speeding-up time. 40 years of playfulness. 40 years of stuckness. 40 years of Sheffield. 40 years of travel. 40 years of dialogue and 40 years of searching. 40 years of moments onstage and off where things cohere and crystallise only to evaporate. 40 years of trying to make a space in which another theatre might exist. 40 years pushing, pulling, inviting, enticing audiences into a different space – the theatre, yes, but a different one. 40 years of another theatre. And more to come.

Tim Etchells
Artistic Director
Forced Entertainment
October 2024

Photograph: Forced Entertainment in 1984, basement of 388 City Road.
L to R: Huw Chadbourn, Susie Williams, Tim Etchells, Robin Arthur, Cathy Naden, Richard Lowdown.
Photo: Tim Etchells