Bloody Mess
A strobe light flickers, pointed at the ground. A pair of clowns in smeared make-up start an ugly fight that threatens to take over the stage.A delinquent cheerleader dances and yells. A woman weeps in a fit of operatic grief then stops, changes costume and starts again. The strains of Deep Purple or maybe Black Sabbath blast from the PA only to be replaced by the Bach Cello Suites. A bloke starts to tell the history of the world from the Big Bang onwards but is quickly interrupted. A sound check. An interview. A seductive monologue. Rock-gig roadies creep across the stage – bringing disco lights, new speakers and a microphone that no one really wants. A woman in a gorilla suit chucks popcorn at anything that moves like a demented refugee from pantomime. A dance is performed by two beautiful well-dressed men sporting homemade tin foil stars. A beautiful silence is staged.
Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess defies description and categorisation. Marking the culmination of their twenty years work in theatre it is an epic for ten performers that creates a startling new logic from the collisions of disconnected characters, stories and performances. From the outset at which each actor confides in the audience about how he or she would like to be seen during the show, trouble seems inevitable – rivalries, contradictions and complete incompatibility seem to rule the day. But as disaster beckons and the ‘show’ crashes into energetic chaos Bloody Mess succeeds in interweaving its disparate elements to make a whole that is intelligent, darkly comic and unexpectedly poignant. Bloody Mess is Forced Entertainment at its best – uncompromising political Pop Art, ironic physically demanding camp trash, visual spectacle that tries to describe the contemporary world in all of its beauty, horror and complexity. Forced Entertainment call Bloody Mess a kind of manifesto for the future – the mess they have made this time is big, bloody and beautiful.
Genuine audience members only. No drunks. No timewasters.
© Forced Entertainment 2004. Theatre performance.
Bloody Mess was co-produced by Festival THEATERFORMEN (Hannover), KunstenFESTIVALdesArts (Brussels), Rotterdamse Schouwburg (Rotterdam), Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Wiener Festwochen (Vienna) and supported by LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre) and Nuffield Theatre Lancaster. Work-in-progress performances were co-produced by SpielArt Festival (Munich).
Credits
Conceived and devised by the company
Performers: Robin Arthur, Davis Freeman, Wendy Houstoun, Jerry Killick, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor, Bruno Roubicek, John Rowley
Direction: Tim Etchells
Text: Tim Etchells and the company
Design: Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design: Nigel Edwards
