Academic Article
The first thing that we did in the lesson was read the below academic article, categorising and highlighting key quotes into the sections: facts, style, and past performances. I found the article easy and interesting to read, mostly because I have read academic articles for coursework and EPQ work and because I really like the style of Etchells/Forced Entertainment. I would be very happy if I got a play by Forced Entertainment in either this unit (contemporary theatre) or in the Director's Challenge unit as I want to experiment with how this style works and how it can be improved - I am also inspired because of the company's Sheffield based background.
The major style that is evident when watching a Forced Entertainment style or by reading the article is that their plays are powered by society. Moreover, their plays don't appear to follow any real storyline. Most of the time they are stating truths or lies (as shown in Speak Bitterness) which are all presented as fact. Not only is what they do onstage improvised, as it is said in the article, Forced Entertainment can be seen as "avant-garde", that is, ahead of their time which I think is clearly true as shown by their "1994 piece entitled, A Decade of Forced Entertainment" where they plotted world events onto a map of the UK. Additionally, the influence of other contemporary practitioners can be seen with a suggestion of Boal where an audience member is expected to be an active participant; this is also similar to Brecht because an audience member has to think about what Brceht is trying to suggest which is certainly done with a form of spass in Forced Entertainment. Forced Entertainment does differ slightly from Brecht - Forced Entertainment does have a political vibe, but it's certainly not as in-yer-face as Brecht did with his play entitled The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui which is most definitely seen as a parable as Hitler's rise to power. Forced Entertainment differs in style to Stanislavski as well; Stanislavski has characters, a visible plotline, and said that an audience member should enjoy themselves when watching a piece of theatre - he is much more about finding a way to connect to an audience by making them emotional by distancing them through an actor's circles of attention and by allowing a character's story arc to be similar to that of an audience. Forced Entertainment and Etchells, however, want an audience member to have an active part in the piece, which can be summarised by the comment that when an audience is witnessing something traumatic on stage, they aren't living it.
Speak Bitterness
"The essence of Speak Bitterness is a line of people making confessions from behind a long table. Occupying a brightly lit space, the performers take turns reading from the text that is strewn across the table. The litany of wrongdoing to which they confess ranges from the big time of forgery, murder or genocide to nasty little details, such as reading each other’s diaries and refusing to take the dogs out for a walk.
First presented in 1994, Speak Bitterness has subsequently been shown in both theatre and durational versions, the latter lasting up to six hours and allowing the public to arrive, depart and return at any point. An exhaustive catalogue, the text draws on the diverse cultures of confession in, for example, contemporary chat shows, churches and show trials. Dressed in suits, the performers compete to confess the most horrific, amusing or convincing things. Speaking softly, they meet the gaze of the audience (who are partly illuminated), drawing them into direct and intimate contact."
The major theme, I believe, that is present in Speak Bitterness is that of the need to confess as highlighted under themes in the academic article above. The play feels as though it is improvised especially as actors appear to speak and move in whatever way whenever they feel like it. There's a feeling that the play is personal because an audience member has probably read someone else's diary or not taken the dogs for a walk as suggested in the quote above. Not only does that make an audience member feel guilty about the actor, it makes them feel guilty about their actions. This perfectly shows their style as they are actively involving audience members in order to make them connect with the actor and potentially more with themselves. The video below is a five-minute clip from the play:
The video below is our own interpretation of an extract from the play:
Most of what is shown in the video is improvised - when we would say lines and what line we would say which allowed for people to speak over each other and showed people's actual reactions to what was going on. We wanted the section to feel as though it was a group of people simply reading off a script with no predetermined movements and to seem as casual as possible in order to relate to more audience members. This can be shown by the casual entrances and exits, the sparing humour that we use, and in the use of scripts as props. I do think that we expressed the politicalness of the piece too much and made it too obvious with Joel's line at the end: "We're guilty. We confess" which although does show the theme, it makes the theme too obvious and too in-yer-face but certainly not as much as Brecht. Personally, I really enjoyed this performance as I felt comfortable and natural and it allowed me to experiment with a theatre that I don't feel I fully understood when we did our first lesson on Forced Entertainment at the start of last year.
Tabletop series
"In Complete Works six performers create condensed versions of each and every Shakespeare play, comically and intimately retelling them, using a collection of everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the one-metre stage of an ordinary tabletop.
Forced Entertainment have long had an obsession with virtual or described performance, exploring in different ways over the years the possibilities of conjuring extraordinary scenes, images and stories using language alone. In a brand new direction for the group, Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare explores the dynamic force of narrative in relation to Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and late plays. What follows is simple and idiosyncratic, absurd and strangely compelling as, through a kind of lo-fi, home-made puppetry, the stories of the plays really do come to life in vivid miniature.
Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works is the first time they’ve approached dramatic literature and the Shakespearean legacy. The result is a kind of levelling of the plays – a gently comic re-casting of them via objects from the kitchen cabinet and grocery store shelves – as well as a celebration of their power as stories, and the act of storytelling and theatre itself."
https://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/complete-works-table-top-shakespeare/
Below is a video of myself and Maya's version of the tabletop series based off the musical West Side Story:
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