Created as we celebrate our 40th Birthday year, UK premiere Southbank October 2024
Performed by Chimutengwende & Cathy Naden, the piece is a dialogue of speech and movement, questions and answers.
A Sisyphean slapstick, a warehouse somewhere in a cartoon hell, a brash video game on a broken loop.
A comical and poignant text by Tim Etchells for young performers aged 8 – 15
A troupe of hapless clowns do their level best to get along and pass the time.
Returning to our 1998 performance Dirty Work, we have created a new version of the piece that digs deeper into the comical and unsettling territory.
Specially commissioned durational performance for the 2016 Foreign Affairs Festival in Berlin
Forced Entertainment's hallucinatory work about optimism, individual agency and the desire for change
All of the Shakespeare plays condensed into a series of 36 forty five minute works played out on a one metre square tabletop
Forced Entertainment’s first ever show made especially for children aged 6+
A unique and compelling performance based on the award-winning novel The Notebook (1986), by Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf
A collaboration with Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui. We are in the rubble of a story...
From love and death to sex and laundry, from shipwrecks to falling snow, personal anecdotes rub shoulders with imaginary movies and half-remembered novels
Two performers imagine a multitude of hypothetical futures in this low-fi theatrical explosion
It's bright under the lights, and hot, and frightening
Follow a beleaguered pair of protagonists on a rollercoaster ride through the decimated remains of contemporary culture
“Socks are gloves for the feet. Snow is cold. Water is the same thing as ice. In America things are bigger”
A lone performer takes to the stage, explaining that the show we're watching is somehow different tonight
Somewhere, amid the frequent flurries of fireproofed theatrical snow and the improvised scenery, there’s a bold attempt to tell the Story of Mankind
Based on a project by the renowned French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain marks the first time that Forced Entertainment have worked from ‘a text’.
A strobe light flickers, pointed at the ground. A pair of clowns in smeared make-up start an ugly fight that threatens to take over the stage…
Based on a series of stream-of-consciousness texts by Tim Etchells and performed by a total company of 20.
Through the summer of 2002, members of Forced Entertainment undertook a series of solo journeys in the UK...
“I ask my friends to send stories and videotapes. For the stories I ask for things that are true. For the tapes I say: Don’t make me anything special—send what you have.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen. While you're with us tonight, we'd like to ask you to try to forget about the outside world completely”
A two-person theatre piece and a video installation for a found space in which a series of interviewees talk about their scars and the stories behind them.
A surreal examination of Britain at the end of the ‘90s, Disco Relax centres on a disconnected dialogue between two women which takes place during a long night of drinking.
Stretching from midnight to midnight, Who Can Sing A Song to Unfrighten Me? takes the public and its fourteen performers on a long journey from night to day and back again.
Set on a tiny wooden stage with ragged curtains, Dirty Work involves two performers who alternately compete and work together to imagine and describe a performance.
If each of Forced Entertainment’s pieces were a room in a house, Pleasure would definitely be the basement — a dark, scary place of surreal melancholy.
A comical piece in which the concerns of adult life, especially death, are played out in a visual language drawn from children’s picture books and pantomimes.
Part game, part improvisation, Quizoola! is a six hour durational performance based on a text of 2000 questions
A map of the period between 1984 and 1994 — a map that is at the same time accurate, haunted, fictitious and false.
“Long ago and far away there was a country and all the people that lived there were a bunch of fucking cunts…”
Speak Bitterness shows a group of penitents whose enormous task it is to confess to everything
“I’ve shot up this stuff that makes time run fast-forwards and now it’s starting to take effect...”
“In the summer when the earth changed, it rained for five months and on the night the rain stopped, a silence fell like we’d woke up in a silence from a dream…”
Marina & Lee begins with a physics lecture from a woman in a shop-girl's overalls.
A (rather unlikely) Elvis Presley impersonator in Birmingham, England performs his act on a tacky nightclub stage.
Three drunks in bad wigs and jumble-sale clothes enact endlessly the events surrounding the supposed or imagined death of one of their friends.
“Part two was also their heartache for the city outside. They named it & renamed it every day despite the bitter cold…”
Shapes and gestures of a narrative are replayed and turned into a kind of minimal choreography.
Three performers use choreographed gestures and narrative moments from gangland interrogation scenes.
In a silent, minimalist choreography, the piece explores sexual identity and our relationship to images from the media.
The first performance by Forced Entertainment, Jessica established many of the motifs and strategies that would be present in the work for the next five years.
