Forced Entertainment: The Thrill of It All

By Oliver Basciano

In terms of the stage, what you see is what you get with theatre company Forced Entertainment. The audience is at liberty to take stock of the props and minimal staging in the first instance, as they walk into the auditorium: a clothes rail of umbrellas and sequined jackets, a plantation of cardboard palm trees, a curtain that will reveal the cardboard cutout lettering spelling out ‘The End’ from the very first sequence, a settee, bottles of water for the actors, microphones. The Thrill of It All admits its status as a construct of artifice before an actor has even stepped foot on stage. This is the empty beginning, and there will be an end, it poetically says.

When the 8-strong Sheffield-based cast of equal gender does arrive, the artifice is vamped up to showbusiness levels with a big opening song-and-dance number using a frankly amazing Japanese cabaret tune. The actors at first imbue an enthusiastic competence to their task before, as a dramatic affect, falling out of time with the music and each other as the song progresses – a metaphor for the character relations yet to be played out. At the shambolic ending of this number, one of the female cast member picks up a microphone – the output pitch of which has been turned to its highest levels – which she uses selfconsciously to gee-up excitement among the audience: “It’s going to be like a party” she proclaims, all squeaky voice exuberance. The actor’s voice is a pastiche of Betty Boo femininity, forced into playing the role of happy MC despite – as she later admits in conversation with a morose and likewise artificially deep voiced male counterpart  – not really feeling emotionally up to playing that upbeat role “tonight”. Again the artifice is vamped up before being quietly destroyed.

Forced Entertainment, The Thrill of It All, 2010. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

From thereon in, the play develops through several song and dance numbers, interspersed with studies on clichés of dramatic personas. In part the dialogue facilitates a rumination from the audience on the different contextual definitions of the word ‘play’: a play being The Thrill of it All’s medium but also being, in part, a significant study on the idea of play – the action of fun – and the manner in which it conducts itself through social relations. Not long after the opening sequence the actors wheel to the front of the stage a settee and pile onto it – sitting on the arms, squeezed onto the seats and leaning from behind – perhaps referencing the now ubiquitous opening credit sequence of the US sitcom Friends (1994 – 2004). One is reminded that Forced Entertainment as a company have been going since 1984, and with much of the founding members present on the stage, the social bond being acted out needn’t necessarily be so far from the truth. These chums amalgamated here are not as clean-cut as Chandler, Monica and the rest however; it’s a post-party, small hours come-down bonhomie of close friends being played out. With each emotional tract the play investigates, it does so by taking it to extremes – the characters winding themselves round to the same levels as the microphone pitch dials – often hilariously and always with a building tension: in this case the emotional barriers of physical contact among the sweaty individuals has been torn down by the night’s antics resulting in an undercurrent of irritation, particularly stemming from the female characters.

Forced Entertainment, The Thrill of It All, 2010. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

This investigation into the extremity of social – and in turn dramatic – motifs is shown again and again in multiple guises to very funny, clever and beguiling affect. A full on brawl transpires after two of the male actors fail to understand a third’s attempts at philosophical gravitas in describing insignificant details of daily life, elevating them in his use of pathos and repetition. The same male actors claim they have fallen in love with unidentified members of the audience, as each attempts to outdo each other in their declarations of love, one claims he has fallen deeply in love with “a whole row” whom he is going to make love to. An innocent sounding squeaky female counterpart argues that that would be ridiculous “because you only have five fingers”. A third female monologues about how appearing on stage is “her dream” and that to have achieved it is life itself, a parody of the requisite tear-filled pleading necessary among television talent show contestants. Scenes of ridicule and emotional heightening play out until a forcible – and as naturally, nervously, comic – double death scene. In laying out, in a vigorously methodical manner (disguised perhaps behind the anarchic physicality of the action), all the tropes of dramatic emotion, Forced Entertainment have no less than picked apart the fabric of human relations, laying them bare and in jeopardy. The stage, the company and theatre, as such, acts as a microcosm of the state of human play.

The Thrill of It All is at the Riverside Studios, London to 6 November, after which it tours to Manchester, Rotterdam, Vienna and Saint Etienne's Made in Britain festival.