FE Recall: No.2 – Cathy Naden

We toured Showtime in the late nineties. I played a dog, wearing a dog’s head mask thing and an overcoat and cords. I chased around on all fours, clenched my hands like paws and I barked. Somewhere, I can’t remember where, woofs started coming back at me from the audience. It was pretty hard to tell what was going on and I only discovered afterwards that this barking was a real dog and not someone having a bit of fun.

Last November we were on tour at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter and by chance I met a blind woman in the café ahead of the show that evening. She told me how she’d come to a Forced Entertainment production there many years ago, she couldn’t remember what it was called, but one of the performers was pretending to be a dog and her old guide dog took a shine to it and kept barking.

Cathy Naden, Forced Entertainment