Forced Entertainment – The Yorkshire Tour

Photo by Hugo Glendinning
Photo by Hugo Glendinning

Forced Entertainment, the Sheffield-based theatre company with a string of plaudits as long as the M1, are about to embark on a grand tour of Yorkshire, starting with a brief stay-cation in Sheffield to celebrate the Crucible Theatre’s 40th, and ending at the Compass Festival of Live Art, in Leeds.

Innovators, experimentalists, boundary-pushers ….these are the sorts of words that are regularly used to describe Forced Entertainment’s work. My favourite description about the company is by Lyn Gardner who wrote that, “like a child breaking the toy it loves, the company picks up theatre and bangs it off the walls, intent on discovering what you can do with something broken that you couldn’t do before.”

If it’s a first visit, be prepared for anything and everything; their style is combative, brilliant and disarming; and sometimes (often) they might break the 4th wall convention and talk to you directly, tell you off, bring some home truths right to your theatre seat. My first experience of Forced Entertainment was about 15 years ago, in the tiny but brilliantly programmed Leeds Met Studio Theatre. I was settling in for a passive experience only to look up and meet a pair of accusing eyes telling me off for being absent, waking me up very very fast. I did, and it was worth it.

That Night Follows Day takes place at the Crucible Theatre, 2pm on Saturday 5 November, the first time this world-travelled show has been heard in English. The free (but ticketed) event, invites audiences into the heart of the theatre for a rehearsed reading, the sort of intimate experience usually reserved for the company and crew. Written by Tim Etchells, the Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, and delivered by 16 local schoolchildren, That Night Follows Day puts adult words, deceits, white lies & the rules that influence their children’s lives, into the mouths of babes, written by adults for adults, delivered by children with a scathing wit.

To book (free) tickets ring Sheffield Theatres on 0114 249 6000.

Next up is Huddersfield’s Lawrence Batley Theatre, where the bleakly comedic Void Story gives dystopian storytelling a shake up. Void Story takes a journey with two weary travellers, passing through the remains of what appears to be modern society, it’s glory days all but passed. They find the stub ends of life, are mugged, shot at, bitten by insects, stowed away, hidden, escaped, lost and left stumbling through a night that fails to light their way – a night without stars in the sky.

Clearly the story itself is bleak, the subject matter dark, but without doubt it will be shot through with Forced Entertainment’s deeply funny, macabre, death-rattle humour, Void Story is presented as a radio play, read by the actors, who punctuate the script with made-up sound effects, alongside a show-reel of images that present a storyboard for Void Story ‘the film’ – a film that could never, would never, be made.

To book ring The Lawrence Batley Theatre Huddersfield on 01484 430528 or visit www.thelbt.org

‘And On The Thousandth Night’ is a 6 hour, come-and-go-as-you-like performance taking place within the Compass Festival of Live Art, at Howard Assembly Room, Leeds. (26 November, 6pm). The stage is lined regally, with a duchy (collective noun anyone?) of Kings and Queens wearing makeshift cloaks and made-up crowns, who convey a story that constantly shifts, as each performer chips in with other ‘facts’, diverts the listener & re-routes the fiction. The stories are drawn from anything and everything – film plots, folk tales, modern myths, horror stories, urban myths… Whatever it is about, it seems timely in 2011, the year the Sun tripped over its own complex fiction, to experience the power of myth-making, the reality of different points of view & the influence of millions of storytellers making things up as they go…

To book tickets visit www.operanorth.co.uk/events/on-thousandth-night/