photos: Hugo Glendinning

...Still, here goes:

Forced Entertainment is the same age as me, which makes me feel like the ultimate underachiever. The company, comprised of six core artists, has been together since 1984; condensing their practice into a paragraph is doomed from the start. Their performances disassemble all things theatrical, reinvent storytelling and toy with failure. Echoes of Forced Entertainment are easy to spot in countless pieces by companies who came after; yet, they somehow balance between experimental and establishment. They are based in Sheffield but can often be found around the world; in continental parts of Europe, they are the first thing that comes to mind when someone says ‘performance’ and ‘England’. Live streams of their durational performances are legendary and have been known to trend ahead of politicians and pop stars.

The Notebook is on at the Battersea Arts Centre from 3rd November. It’s an adaptation of a novel by the Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf and a rare chance to see Forced Entertainment work with another author’s text.

The Battersea Arts Centre dates also served as an excuse to talk to Tim Etchells, the company’s Artistic Director.

Run Riot: The Notebook takes place in the midst of devastation and war, with the marginalised kids and the sidelined old forced to be together. What makes the 1986 novel a good sounding board for today?

Tim Etchells: Well, it’s twice or even three times distant in a sense - a 1986 novel written by a Hungarian writer about the last years of the second world war! But when you read the book though, or see the performance, I think it’s very immediate and the relevance is clear. It’s a book about brutalisation – about people turned to extremes by events that are out of their control, about how brutal circumstances generate alienation and violence. I think the connection to now is clear – in an xenophobic, right-leaning, neo-Liberal austerity Europe there are plenty of parallels!

It’s a dark story but it has its comical side too. The two central characters – twins who are sent as refugees to the countryside to avoid the bombing raids on the city – invent their own private code and way of dealing with the world and what it throws at them. Their survival methods are absurd, subversive and disturbing and the whole book is played out as a kind of fairy-tale deadpan. It feels very present, for all its weirdness.

Run Riot: The only characters on stage in The Notebook are two children, played by adults who refrain from pretending to be children. How did you approach the difficult matter of ‘staging’ kids?

Tim Etchells: The two children in the novel are twins; they also use ‘we’ and not ‘I’ when they write the narration that comprises the novel.

We went so far as to dress Richard and Robin in identical suits and jumpers, and they read from the school exercise book in which the protagonists have written their account of their misadventures and experiences. I don’t think they ever really pretend to be children though, I don’t think we could have borne that! But they speak the words attributed to the kids and in a sense occupy their viewpoint. It’s interesting how little you have to do though – just the gesture of the identical suits and glasses; the occasional patches of unison reading really connect them deeply to the characters.

The other interesting thing is that these particular kids in the book are such strange figures anyway – their whole private way of thinking about and describing the world. It’s child-like in some ways, but it’s also something else, a very dark logic – they’re determined to describe the world as it really is, without judgement or emotion. It’s quite scary in a way.

Run Riot: How is this rejection of individuality different on stage and on paper?

Tim Etchells: Well you feel it in the book of course. You’re aware of the conceit – that the two boys want to be indistinguishable, a team, nameless. They don’t even tell their names. It’s pretty much all ‘we’. Reading you understand that there is a violence to this and an unworkableness…but of course in the performance you have to deal with that even more straight-on. There’s something audacious about the insistence, the double act, when you see Richard and Robin there; you see that they’re different, you really tune to the small gestural differences, the small breaks in their breathing and inflection. So you’re very aware of the force of this double-act, and the violence of it, its untenability. It’s a simple thing but, like so much of this particular piece, the strength and impact of it is very much connected to the simplicity.

Run Riot: Forced Entertainment recently performed Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre in Berlin over several days, table-top style, using common household items as props. Did you worry about being charged with treason upon your return? On a more serious note - what’s your relationship to Shakespeare, as an artist working outside the more classically inclined part of British theatre?

Tim Etchells: I think 30 years of making our own work, devising and making new performances from scratch with pretty much everything made, invented, authored and improvised by the group should allow us a free pass for the occasional sojourn into great literature!

Shakespeare for me is still pretty much connected to school and later studies. I really love the language - it always grips me when going to see the plays. But at the same time the plays are always haunted by the classroom. In approaching the plays for Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare I was interested in boiling the plays down to the plots – to the clockwork mechanisms that drive them along. It gives a very different perspective. What I like in that project is that we are doing the plays, taking them all on somehow, but then at the same time we aren’t doing them at all – only diagramming them, summoning them in this rather absurd lo-fi puppet show. What’s really interesting is that they still work. People can see the project at the Barbican next year, where we will present them over 6 days from 1^st to 6^th March 2016.  

Run Riot: Your live streams have become performance events in their own right. How did you come to pursue the technology? Does it bring a new dimension to your work or the relationship with audiences?

Tim Etchells: I’ve been following a lot of stuff around virtual community, dispersed interaction, internet collaboration and so on for a long time. And in a strange way it seems to me that the long pieces which we made in the 90s, but which we started to do more recently as live streams were always waiting for that technology. That sense of being able to go in and out of the performance, the sort of porousness to real-life, that’s something very strong in the durational pieces and it’s doubled in the online context - we really like the way that there’s a continuous dialogue alongside and around the performances – via Twitter and so on. It’s also interesting that the work has such an intimacy over the screen, there’s definitely something there and I think we have a pretty good, developing understanding of where to go with those projects.

Run Riot: 1984: the Tories were guaranteed a majority in the parliament for at least another four years, the miners were striking, the unemployment was skyrocketing and Forced Entertainment was formed. One is tempted to draw parallels between then and now - what are your survival tips for companies starting out?

Tim Etchells: Well it’s the same in some ways of course, and very different in others. I think at this point you see less of the ensemble / devising group model than we used to see… economically it’s rather too hard to sustain. We’re in the age of the network – everyone has to be ultra-freelance, hot-swappable, move in and out of contexts at high speed. The decision to commit to other people, to a long sustained practice, to something slow in that particular way seems unlikely perhaps right now. But on the other hand it has such advantages, at least concerning the strength of the work. The company is such a source of knowledge, such a great shared set of skills and understandings. Kate Valk from the Wooster Group in New York wrote a beautiful text last year, as part of Forced Entertainment’s birthday celebrations, describing the experience of watching Forced Ents onstage and recognising that the work, and the relationships, are something “that can’t be bought with money, only with time”. I thought a lot about that observation, which seemed really correct.

The only advice I can think of is to follow what you’re interested in – your obsessions, your fascinations. Those are all you have really, in the end.

Run Riot: How do you find new avenues to explore and new challenges to tackle after more than thirty years together?

Tim Etchells: We allow ourselves to change and we don’t plan much. We wait and see where we are going. We find ourselves along the way. It makes for difficulties in terms of funders and partner organisations sometimes – we should be much faster to fit the market! But we’ve learned to give things the space and time they need; that’s a part of respecting the work also; not to rush it, not to demand too much too soon. I think the best of our work comes that way.

The Notebook

3 – 14 November

Battersea Arts Centre