Forced Entertainment are unpredictable, sometimes playing with an audience’s reaction as much as the conventions of performance; you can neverexpect, only anticipate. And it is that sense of anticipation that hangs in the air of the auditorium tonight. The stage is set with desks on either side, microphones, reading lamps, scripts, sound-desk and the ever necessary artist’s iMac – all present under a screen projection of brilliant white. Residually illuminating all before us, it is a central component of what will take place, dominating the space and those that will undoubtedly sit below it. It is oblivion, and this is where our story of the void begins.
As the performers sit at their desks and run through a performed script reading, the central screen projects stills in a 1980s Jackanory style to illustrate the unfolding narrative. Sound effects and vocal distortions manipulate the portrayal of characters, and are placed alongside the deadpan reading that runs through this darkly cynical satire. Appropriately there is no physical life in the performance, for we are taken into a lifeless collage world of grey singular dimensions. Here a couple stand at the window of their tower block apartment looking out on a bleak industrial urban world. ‘It’s dark out there,’ one says, as the other replies, ‘It’s only light when people want it to be.’ This is nowhere and yet everywhere. It is a landscape made up of the indistinguishable minutia of the real world: a fence from Sheffield, a wall from London. All were pulled from the internet and splashed upon the screen to create this juxtaposed dystopia.
The narrative takes us through the couple’s catalytic desire to constantly ‘get out’ of their current situation. They are consumers looking for something. They encounter trigger-happy law enforcement, a black market smuggler, charity cold-callers, killer hornets, a cyborg child selling books, religion, snipers, a hotel next door to a brothel, human trafficking, and a manipulative little girl who gets what she wants with threats of allegations of pedophilia. This hellish world however is familiar: it is our modern life, estranged to us as viewers through the reprographic grey collage.
Both protagonists receive mortal wounds to their bodies, and the visceral sound of the blood squelching from them causes the audience to recoil with a mixture of disgust and delight. Laughter replaces both as at different times they nonchalantly brush away an imminent death scene with the distraction of the next obstacle. They are figures in a perpetual cycle of suffering; the dark humour of each moment links them together, but where a visceral moment is replaced by an incidental action both are statements on an endless consumeristic desire to experience more and, importantly, to escape. Yet we gradually become equally locked in this cycle as voyeurs, consuming their endeavors with a vicarious glee, securely hidden in the dark confines of the comfortable theatre.
This purgatory is a world without soul, yet incongruously it is a world in which fortune tellers have a voice and the spirit of a murder victim haunts a hotel room. Perhaps this is a commentary upon hope or merely the commodification of Otherness. Yet in the final moments of the performance the couple find themselves locked in an epic dance competition where if they win they are told that their troubles will be over. They dance forever, against a backdrop of repeated moments and identical competitors until left alone they can no longer remember who they are: ‘We’re nothing, just wallpaper: background noise.’ As white oblivion returns, the auditorium fades into darkness and we sit in silence. In that moment before a ripple of applause begins, we are in our own void, waiting to experience the next situation, finally aware of our own capitalist, consumer-driven existence.