The landscape we’ve charted has been one of cities, late-night television, ghosts and half-remembered stories. The themes we have returned to are love and fragmentation, the search for identity, the edges of sexuality, the need to confess. (Tim Etchells / Forced Entertainment)

Described by The Guardian as “Britain’s most brilliant experimental theatre company,” Forced Entertainment is an ensemble of six artists led by director and writer Tim Etchells. Formed in 1984, the group make original work for diverse art forms from their base in Sheffield, UK. Originally focused on making and touring theatre performances, Forced Entertainment’s work now spans theatre, durational performance / live art, gallery installation, video and digital media. The group’s work has been presented throughout the UK and Europe. as well as further afield, receiving great acclaim in cities from Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, London and New York to Beirut, Vienna, Helsinki and Zagreb.

The themes the company return to are life in cities, identity and sexual politics, the relationship of lived experience to the images of media culture, the nature of language, the attractiveness of chaos and the desire for order, and the need to confess. Their approach is rigorous and at the same time hybrid and eclectic. Forced Entertainment have continually tried to find new performance and theatre forms with which to describe contemporary urban life. Their work is emphatically a group creation – made during long months of improvisation and discussion and drawing on theatre itself as well as on cinema, music culture, literature and fine art.

Although Forced Entertainment’s performance projects are recognisable at a glance, there are no rules that govern the form of a piece. Some projects feature large amounts of spoken text, others none. Some are high-energy, brash and chaotic; others are still, highly focused and minimalist. Many of the performances are collage-like in structure – combining types and layers of material drawn from very different genres or sources in fluid or disruptive structures. Other pieces play out simple performance tasks at great length – wringing the last drop of meaning from an apparently unpromising source.

Widely regarded as ‘one of the most important performance groups in Europe,’ (Der Tagesspiegel), Forced Entertainment continues to make work which explores the possibilities of theatre, and is engaging, challenging and surprising.

A new creation: Bloody Mess (2004)

A delinquent cheerleader dances and yells. A strobe light flickers, pointed at the ground. A pair of clowns in smeared make-up start an ugly fight that threatens to take over the stage. A woman weeps in a fit of operatic grief then stops, changes costume and starts again. The strains of Deep Purple or maybe Black Sabbath blast from the PA only to be replaced by the Bach Cello Suites. A bloke starts to tell the history of the world from the Big Bang onwards but is quickly interrupted. A sound check. An interview. A seductive monologue. Rock-gig roadies creep across the stage – bringing disco lights, new speakers and a microphone that no one really wants. A woman in a gorilla suit chucks popcorn at anything that moves, like a demented refugee from pantomime. A dance is performed by two beautiful well-dressed men sporting homemade tin foil stars. A beautiful silence is staged.

Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess defies description and categorisation. Marking the culmination of their twenty years work in theatre, it is an epic for ten performers that creates a startling and comical new logic from the collisions of disconnected characters, stories and performances. From the outset, at which each actor confides in the audience about how he or she would like to be seen during the show, trouble seems inevitable – rivalries, contradictions and complete incompatibility seem to rule the day. But as disaster beckons and the ‘show’ crashes into energetic chaos, Bloody Mess succeeds in interweaving its disparate elements to make a whole that is intelligent, darkly comic and unexpectedly poignant. Bloody Mess is Forced Entertainment at its best – uncompromising political Pop Art, ironic physically demanding camp trash, visual spectacle that tries to describe the modern world in all of its beauty, horror and complexity. Forced Entertainment call Bloody Mess a kind of manifesto for the future – the mess they have made this time is big, bloody and beautiful.

Genuine audience members only. No drunks. No timewasters.

An exceptional retake of 12 am: Awake & Looking Down (1993)

“Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully and the failure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly.”

(Peggy Phelan, Unmarked : The Politics of Performance)

Created in 1993, 12am: Awake & Looking Down is the first durational performance work by the company, a marathon of inventiveness and improvisation in which five silent performers endlessly reinvent their identities using cardboard signs to name themselves and a vast store of jumble sale clothing. Over six hours the five performers present an enthralling kaleidoscope of half-stories and ghost characters set loose in a magical space.

12am... is a physical and highly visual performance that starts from a vast and constantly growing catalogue of names - from FRANK (DRUNK) to THE HYPNOTISED GIRL, via ELVIS PRESLEY (THE DEAD SINGER) through A NINE-YEAR-OLD SHEPHERD BOY and A STEWARDESS FORGETTING HER DIVORCE to A BLOKE WHO'S JUST BEEN SHOT. Scrawled onto cardboard, these names are an index of the real, the filmic, the fantastic, the gritty and the whimsical - people we have seen countless times before in straight to video movies, on trash TV, in the street and the supermarket, and of course, in the mirror, when we catch ourselves unaware.

12am... plays on the exhaustion and dogged endurance of the performers to create a unique event that is comic, mesmeric and moving.

The performance lasts for six hours, during which the public are free to come and go as they wish.