What is it that makes a good story? This is the deceptively simple question Forced Entertainment coyly pose in the opening moments of new productionThe Coming Storm. And it’s a big one! Their responses are multiple, thoughtful and partisan, as you might expect from a company whose body of work has steadily dismantled many of the givens of the contemporary dramatic form. Contrastive options gain momentum and lists build into an extended opening monologue that’s both sublime and casual, ridiculous and profound.
As it settles into its rhythm, the performance opens into a series of broken narratives offered by the six-strong cast, from the random, daft, seemingly inconsequential, to the personal and evocative and occasionally gripping. Each is complemented by a rough staging by the ensemble with their ready instinct for staging and game play and the piece riffs on diverse theatricalities, from the pantomime to the post-dramatic, retaining a scratchy improvised tone throughout. My reliance on lists in this review reflects the piece’s wilful multifariousness. Any answer can only ever be partial, personal. Theatre, like life, is provisional: not meaningless but rather overloaded with too many potential, perhaps pointless meanings. As ever, their work is asking us to consider the conditions of theatre-making, deconstructing all of the choices of meaning and staging that go into making a piece of work.
What the stories share in common is their identification with individuals in the cast – this is Cathy’s story; this one is something that Robin wants to tell. And these are individuals we want to spend time with – their presences are funny, self deprecating, empathetic. Their interactions with one another and with us feel, largely, genuine and unforced; the contrast between what they’re doing (creating fictions) and how they’re doing it, at times, extreme.
So it’s clever, provocative, sure. Peppered too with easy comedy and pleasant to spend time inside. But it feels straightforward to identify what they are doing, what hypothesis they are testing. I feel I have encountered this question before in their work (most clearly in 2004’s Bloody Mess) and so the experience of the show for me was not so much of treading new ground but rather of revisiting a familiar intellectual landscape, one littered with powerful memories of past incursions to which this exploration couldn’t live up.
It’s long too, even those lovely opening monologues, exploring stories’ key qualities, run on for a length that feels like it goes beyond any point about variousness, even beyond any point about the fruitlessness of the attempt. It feels like there is more yet to be discovered about the rhythm of the show as a whole and about exactly what makes the question they are posing here different to previous questions. Or if it is the same, how the answer might have moved on.
And what is the storm that is coming? Is it the threat of a narrative that might overcome the troupe’s careful accumulations of offers and propositions? Or an access of real feeling that might break through the theatrical constructions? I longed for some sense of anxiety or overwhelm that could push us beyond the controlled feeling of the formal exploration.
I find it a privilege to watch such experienced theatre-makers doing their thing, and I found the work most exciting when it seemed to acknowledge the company’s experiences, or at least the fact that they had experienced some of life, a rare quality in a sector dominated by those young enough to feel they can afford to work in it. Is it naive to want more of the ‘mess’ of life and less of the control of an experiment in work such as this? I hope not, because it’s the urgency of questions about our lives that, to my mind, makes art compelling.