Forced Entertainment is an ensemble of six artists founded in 1984 and based in Sheffield. Touring and presenting their ground-breaking provocative performances across the UK, mainland Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and further afield, the group have sustained a unique collaborative practise for almost forty years.
Led by the artist and writer Tim Etchells, the Forced Entertainment company includes designer and performer Richard Lowdon alongside performers Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor. The group are committed to collective practice, involving and inviting national and international artists to work with us to challenge, develop and reinvent the theatre we make
Forced Entertainment’s work explores and often explodes the conventions of genre, narrative and theatre itself drawing influence not just from drama but from dance, performance art, music culture and popular forms such as cabaret and stand-up. The group operate at different scales, shifting from intimate two-performer works focused on text, to spectacular productions with large numbers of people onstage.
In the Netherlands the group presented in 2015 the Complete works: Table Top Shakespeare, in which the entire oeuvre of ‘England's greatest cultural export product’ was reduced to 36 short miniature performances, using everyday household and kitchen objects as characters and an ordinary table as a stage. On the night of the Brexit in 2019, they played a special edition of the performance Speak Bitterness at Frascati, a six-hour theatrical apology to us, the European Union, the left behind.
Last year, Forced Entertainment presented the performance If all else fails at Spring Festival in Utrecht, a series of short, poignant and absurd sketches, exploring the theme of failure and the role it plays in our lives.
In 2016 Forced Entertainment was winner of the prestigious Ibsen Award. In its statement, the International Ibsen Award Committee said that ‚the committee has chosen to honour this continually surprising and not least entertaining theatre group, because Forced Entertainment revive and challenge the theatre, and recognise and utilise the power inherent in the art form. Forced Entertainment take the theatre’s role within society deeply seriously.‘
The newest work of Forced Entertainment Signal to Noise, celebrating its 40th anniversary, is the Holland Festival coproduction and the first presentation of this group at the festival.