SPECTACULAR

FORCED ENTERTAINMENT (UK)

Forced Entertainment, which the English newspaper The Guardian defines as “the most brilliant English company of experimental theater”, was founded in 1984, in Sheffield, and is formed by six actors. Their work ranges from shows, to more hybrid projects that make use of different media and variety of styles, from exuberant performances to minimal theatrical creations. Their intent is to try to find different ways to address the contemporary.

This is what happens in Spectacular: 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.

SPECTACULAR direction Tim Etchells
with Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall
coproduction BIT Teatergarasgen (Bergen), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou (Parigi), Theatre Garonne (Toulouse), Tramway (Glasgow)

SAT 19.10.2013 | 20.30
TEATRO FOCE – LUGANO

interview Claire Marshall and Robin Arthur