Spectacular

Created 2008

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A lone performer takes to the stage, explaining that the show we’re watching is somehow different tonight. The atmosphere is different, his entrance was off, the lights are wrong, some scenery is missing, some performers are absent. The tone is all wrong. Things are somehow falling to pieces, or maybe things are just now falling into place. The audience reaction, our protagonist says, is not quite what he expected, not quite what he’s used to. Perhaps the fact he is dressed as a skeleton has something to do with it. When a histrionic actress arrives determined to do ‘her big death scene’ the evening gets stranger still.

Spectacular is about the now of the performance moment, the trembling edge of laughter, possibility and invention. It’s about death and playing dead, about the strange contact between two performers on-stage and an audience caught between what they are watching and what they’re being told.

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Video

REACTIONS

"Welcome to the melancholy, wild, hilarious theatre world of Forced Entertainment."

Nachtkritik

"A decidedly different 'good night out'."

The Times

"Spectacular strips the flesh off theatre and gets right down to the bone."

Time Out

"Ping-pongs between the comic and the harrowing."

Metro

credits

Conceived and devised by the company

Performers Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall
Direction Tim Etchells
Design Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design Nigel Edwards

Spectacular is a Forced Entertainment production

Co-produced by BIT Teatergarasjen Bergen, HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, PACT Zollverein Essen, Les Spectacles Vivants – Centre Pompidou Paris, Theatre Garonne Toulouse and Tramway Glasgow