Tim Etchells reflects on 40 years of Forced Entertainment at the Signal to Noise UK Premiere

Last night, Signal to Noise received its UK Premiere at Southbank Centre, London. It was a big moment for the company, which is celebrating 40 years together, and was the first event in an extended London season of performances and collaborations.

After the show, Tim Etchells, Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, shared these thoughts with assembled guests.

Another theatre is possible.

We’ve been lucky to have found –  with each other, with our many collaborators, with you, with audiences all over the world – a long and fruitful conversation.

40 years is not what we planned, it’s the thing that has happened, a route we were lucky to find.  And one that is not complete yet.

Another theatre is possible.

And through 40 years we’ve been lucky enough, one way and another, to find the support, the partnerships and the touring invitations to keep working

And lucky enough to have found the support and leadership from talented people joining us in management, technical and other roles to make the work possible and take it further

And lucky to have had the time to keep on finding new answers to  the question about what theatre might be now and about how theatre might approach its audience now.

And we are not done with answering those questions yet.

Another theatre is possible.

Thanks to those of you whose experience of Forced Entertainment began tonight.
And thanks to those of you who’ve been part of the journey for a slightly longer time, at joining us sometime back in this 40 years.

It means a lot to us, to share this journey, space and the time.

And we are not done with that time or that journey yet

and hope that you will continue with us.

What else.

We began the project of company in 1984, at a time when a very particular theatre held sway on the UK, with a quite singular attitude to theatre itself and a quite particular approach to questions about meaning and of politics, a dominant fixed idea about how theatre might be made and how and where meaning might be found, or how meaning might be communicated.

That situation has changed in some ways – there’s a little more flex in the understanding of theatre here perhaps these days. But at the same time, it hasn’t changed at all. Theatre here is still understood as a largely literary undertaking and it’s gripped tight with a set of orthodoxies – some of them old, some of them new – about meaning, and about approaches to thematics and to politics.

We’ve always worked outside of that frame, trusting that the politics of the work are in the work, that they’re there in its contradictions, its temporalities, its dynamic relation to spectators. At its best I would say, there’s an uneasy, ungraspable, irreconcilable aspect to the work we have made, a pull into discomfort that does a what it can to balance our love of theatrical nonsense and cheap gags. Some of those core qualities the work has – its uneasy, ungraspable qualities – don’t endear our work to these times, which, on the whole, seem focused on more comforting approaches and the statement of apparent certainties. Another theatre is possible.

We are proud to share and celebrate with you the unsteady ground and the troubled heart of this work. Those qualities are amongst its strengths, and they are why we are still rolling.

We celebrate the length and depth of the conversations I mentioned already – conversations – with each other, with our many collaborators, with you, with audiences all over the world, with the young people we have worked closely with in our participation work in Sheffield and elsewhere. Another theatre is possible.

Tonight, we celebrate aspects of our own work and our own long story – but we also celebrate the marker we’ve put down for other artists in the theatre here in the UK, and on the international scene –  the peripheral but central zone we have raised a flag in, just as those artists that inspired and motivated us put down a marker in the years and decades before. I am talking about  the arrow we have drawn, the distress flare we have shot into the sky, the marker we have placed – for artist-led initiatives, for collective making, collective decision making, collective authorship.  For a theatre that brings in energy, ideas and influence from art, from stand-up, from music, from popular culture, from performance, from many other places. For work made in the studio not on the page. For ambiguity, For difficulty. Against realism, because as we often liked to remind people, the real is too important to be left to the realists. Against a narrow definition of politics. For poetry. For the live, relational and constantly unfolding moment of theatre and performance. For its space of individual and collective encounter. For all this. The doors we and others have opened, and will continue to open.

Onwards.

Strength, love, art, politics.

A toast – to absent friends.

Tim Etchells

For Forced Entertainment

10.10.24