Review: First Night, by Forced Entertainment
Toynbee Studios, London, Saturday 9th June
I didn’t want my first review to be a critical one. First, I’d much rather go and see something I like. Second, it’s easier to write a bad review than a good one. And theatre is difficult. We all know that, because if it wasn’t, everyone would be doing it and there would be no call centre operators or insurance salesmen.
But having just suffered 2 hours of “conceptual” theatre, how can I not pass comment? Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on physical theatre/dance theatre/contemporary performance. I’ve dipped my toes, working in contemporary dance conservatoires. I’m probably your typical London audience member. But I’ve never given a pirouette whilst sober or written as essay on postmodern deconstruction or Pina Bausch. So please excuse the utter uneducated vitriolic of the next few paragraphs. No-one’s career is in my hands.
Let’s get this clear - I don’t want to pay £15 on a Saturday night to be bored, even if it is on purpose. I can be bored very nicely most days on the bus, the doctor’s waiting room, or at work, for free. If I have an unexpected reaction, to, say, medication, it’s no comfort to know that a research consultant somewhere finds that very interesting. Likewise, if I am bored at the theatre, it’s no consolation that someone has received a hefty Arts Council Grant to exploit my unexpected utter indifference.
But I race ahead.
Shall we all just leave now?
First Night is a revival of a 2001 vaudeville show by Forced Entertainment, a Sheffield-based company of six led by Mark Etchells, making “ground-breaking” performances in a range of disciplines. I find it a wonder that all three of their UK shows this summer are revivals, and that they begin their show with one of the most exhausted clichés in theatre. I have lost count of the number of student performances I have seen where the performers shuffle uncertainly to the front of the stage, mugging fixed grins and looking surprised to see us there, unsure about who on earth we are and what in God’s name they are supposed to do to entertain us. It invariably continues with a microphone being passed like a hot potato up and down the line until a hapless and unwilling performer is made to speak into it – generally beginning with “Hello” and ending with whatever drivel comes to mind. So I was amazed that a company as established as Forced Entertainment still expect this to unsettle and provoke us.
The effect is of a lopsided, sexualised vaudeville show – the men wear metallic shirts and white jackets, or checked suits, the women sequinned pastel dresses, and huge platform shoes, skirts slanting asymmetrically up to their crotch. All wear blue eyeshadow and fixed or straining grins. The microphone is passed up and down the line until it is forced up to the mouth of a man in a headlock, who begins a stuttering greeting “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the show” in as many languages as he can think of, until his pleas to his captor that he needs to go to the toilet are interrupted by his wetting himself.
One of the performancers exposes her breast, and in an adjacent seat to mine a marvellously po-faced lady with a long white ponytail and half-closed eyes gives one barely perceptible flare of the nostrils.
After what feels like an age, the company shuffle off backwards, only to feel their way, blindfolded, one by one, back onto the stage, until they are all present and grinning and groping sightlessly at the air.
Silence. More grinning and groping. Minutes pass. Silence.
A young man behind me whispers “Shall we all just leave now?”
Death by theatre
When the show came to life, it could be funny and disturbing. A randy blindfolded man with a saw, grin wide and desperate, nervous excitement frothing out of him, tells a series of jokes with forgotten punchlines that turn into increasingly desperate and obscene fantasies about nuns in the bath and armless zombies on an aeroplane. The company mock the conceit of vaudeville by each bringing on a letter, collectively spelling first MYSTERY, then ILLUSION, before mixing them up in a ridiculous dance routine to music from a 1980s crime thriller. And you can’t fault a man zipped up in a laundry bag being chased by the man with saw for a bit of a laugh. But everything was far too long, seemingly unconnected, never resolved, laboured and overestimating its own humour.
Moments of real tension were dissipated by their overemphasis. A clairvoyant predicts the future of individual members of the audience, ranging from the ridiculous “I’m getting a picture of a girl in a green bikini with a sticky face. She wants you to know that she doesn’t blame you” to the uncomfortable “There is a man in the audience who is lying to his wife. He has been unfaithful.” “ Someone in the third row has a lump in their breast.” Until we are all having our means of death foretold with quiet confidence (and the occasional suppressed giggle) by a lone woman, taking the time to single out each member of the audience: “Lung cancer” “Car Crash. Drowning. Idiopathic Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension.” Which was solemn and uncomfortable for about 5 minutes, a mounting sense of superstitious horror and the thrill that one or two might just sheer near the truth. 15 minutes later, and I was practically begging that someone would get round to predicting my death: By theatre.
Snooze control
The “Try not to think about…” exercise went on for a full half hour, its solemnity far outweighed by it’s sheer tedium. I paraphrase: “Ladies and gentlemen, try not to think about anything outside this theatre, try not to think about meetings and appointments…Try not to think about disappointment …the millions of little, little mistakes made time and time again that spell failure. Ladies and Gentleman I’d like to ask you to forget about poverty and starvation, and war, and the lack of clean hospital facilities and flies and hunger and political ideals…” One by one the company dropped out of their line, lit cigarettes, dropped their smiles, brought on cups of tea, laid down and went to sleep.
The audience wasn’t so lucky. Nobody was going to bring us tea. We weren’t allowed to smoke. Two teenage boys in the front row were asleep, their heads on each others shoulders. Po-faced lady had long retreated into her own silence, even after being accused of having herpes. ( When someone had shrieked “ I’d like to have a bucket of piss, so I can drink it all up and piss it on your heads!!” she merely closed her eyes for a second and withdrew).
What a gargantuan effort it must take to perform to an audience like this. And yet they want it to be this way. Several times the performers themselves challenged why we were still there, asking if they were keeping us up, shouting at us to leave, (if I hadn’t been writing this review I would certainly have done so) apologising for the length and quality of the show. For a moment I thought that the note in the programme that the show was two hours long with no interval might be a kind of mind-game. It wasn’t.
Why would they do this to us?
To challenge audience expectations of their theatrical experience. To experiment with the relationship of audience member versus performer by making us the focus of the show. To make boredom a valid response. Tim Etchells writes about “the role of the viewer in making meaning, the economy of expectations and the negotiation of rules both on and off the stage …the temporary community…the always troubled play between reality and spectacle”
Not so much heckling as heckled against
But this negotiation of rules is one-way. We are directly addressed and included but they do not truly expect us to respond, and are unprepared if we do. Another reviewer of an Adelaide peformance of First Night wrote that the show was heckled but that the heckler was largely ignored. It’s cheating and dishonest. If mass portions of the audience had got up to leave when exhorted to , what would they have done? Presumably carried on as long as they could. Congratulated themselves for having “an impact”. In their heart of hearts, would they have died, just a little? Could they justify their audience figures to the Arts Coucil? Isn’t there far better audience-performer negotiation in stand-up comedy?
Audiences of the world unite! Be as difficult as you can! Show them what it really means to “negotiate the audience-performer relationship!” Artistic directors, if you really want to experiment, take your shows to a pub in Salford or Gravesend, not too an narrow audience of London intellectuals.
Good theatre is the exception, that’s why we seek it out. Illusion is delicate but we willingly engage with it The role of the audience in making meaning is all very well, but please don’t cheat us by skipping your own responsibility to entertain and engage. Good theatre should stand by itself. It’s just not difficult enough to make it bad and then write two pages of intellectual twaddle to justify it, scattering your prose with “groundbreaking” and “challenging”.
They may have provoked a response, reaffirmed my convictions. Well done. Will I go again? In their words, I’d rather someone p**ssed on my head.
Forced, yes. Entertainment?
The company’s next show, Bloody Mess, will be performed at the Jarvis Cocker Meltdown Festival on the South Bank on the 19th June. www.forcedentertainment.com