Explore all of the projects we have created from 1984 to the present day here.
Created as we celebrate our 40th Birthday year, premiering in March 2024
Performed by Chimutengwende & Cathy Naden, the piece is a dialogue of speech and movement, questions and answers.
A Sisyphean slapstick, a warehouse somewhere in a cartoon hell, a brash video game on a broken loop.
To Move In Time, is a monologue written by Tim Etchells for performer Tyrone Huggins
A troupe of hapless clowns do their level best to get along and pass the time.
Forced Entertainment's hallucinatory work about optimism, individual agency and the desire for change
All of the Shakespeare plays condensed into a series of 36 forty five minute works played out on a one metre square tabletop
Two performers imagine a multitude of hypothetical futures in this low-fi theatrical explosion
A fragmentary new multi-episode video-performance in seven parts
A new fragmentary online work in three short episodes.
A comical and poignant text by Tim Etchells for young performers aged 8 – 15
Returning to our 1998 performance Dirty Work, we have created a new version of the piece that digs deeper into the comical and unsettling territory.
Specially commissioned durational performance for the 2016 Foreign Affairs Festival in Berlin
Forced Entertainment’s first ever show made especially for children aged 6+
The group reflect on their work in a special collection of 30th Birthday videos by Hugo Glendinning
Through 2014 Forced Entertainment made an open call for people to submit texts describing, thinking around, considering, marking or in any way remembering the company’s work
A unique and compelling performance based on the award-winning novel The Notebook (1986), by Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf
A solo, improvised text performance by Tim Etchells based on jump-cutting, looping and re-inventing material from his notebooks
A collaboration with Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui. We are in the rubble of a story...
From love and death to sex and laundry, from shipwrecks to falling snow, personal anecdotes rub shoulders with imaginary movies and half-remembered novels
It's bright under the lights, and hot, and frightening
Follow a beleaguered pair of protagonists on a rollercoaster ride through the decimated remains of contemporary culture
“Socks are gloves for the feet. Snow is cold. Water is the same thing as ice. In America things are bigger”
A lone performer takes to the stage, explaining that the show we're watching is somehow different tonight
Somewhere, amid the frequent flurries of fireproofed theatrical snow and the improvised scenery, there’s a bold attempt to tell the Story of Mankind
Based on a project by the renowned French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain marks the first time that Forced Entertainment have worked from ‘a text’.
A playful and provocative essay in photographs and words combining text from artistic director Tim Etchells and images from photographer Hugo Glendinning
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…
Based on a series of stream-of-consciousness texts by Tim Etchells and performed by a total company of 20.
A twelve-hour lecture performance in the form of an A to Z, moving from accounts of Accidents and Anti-Climaxes through to Voyeurism and Waiting before arrival at Zero.
Through the summer of 2002, members of Forced Entertainment undertook a series of solo journeys in the UK...
“I ask my friends to send stories and videotapes. For the stories I ask for things that are true. For the tapes I say: Don’t make me anything special—send what you have.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen. While you're with us tonight, we'd like to ask you to try to forget about the outside world completely”
A series of projections show men and women sat in real-world locations (from hotel lobbies to airport departure lounges) as they recount lists of the things that frighten them.
A two-person theatre piece and a video installation for a found space in which a series of interviewees talk about their scars and the stories behind them.
A bizarre document of an obsessive and darkly comical private performance, Rules of the Game charts the progress of an imaginary drinking game to be played in front of the TV news.
And On The Thousand Night... a long, mutating and endlessly self-cancelling story that seems to include many — if not all — of the stories in the world
A surreal examination of Britain at the end of the ‘90s, Disco Relax centres on a disconnected dialogue between two women which takes place during a long night of drinking.
Stretching from midnight to midnight, Who Can Sing A Song to Unfrighten Me? takes the public and its fourteen performers on a long journey from night to day and back again.
In the organised chaos of a car wrecking yard, a man is dying from gunshot wounds, surrounded by a circle of his killers...
Set on a tiny wooden stage with ragged curtains, Dirty Work involves two performers who alternately compete and work together to imagine and describe a performance.
A wry and comical sex film without action, Filthy Words & Phrases shows the hard work of language.
Paradise was an interactive web project developed from Forced Entertainment’s mixed-media gallery installation, Ground Plans for Paradise (1994).
Nightwalks invites the user into an experience more akin to that of wandering, of trying out versions of the truth and of making playful connections.
If each of Forced Entertainment’s pieces were a room in a house, Pleasure would definitely be the basement — a dark, scary place of surreal melancholy.
Frozen Palaces creates an uncanny experience in which time itself appears to have stopped.
A comical piece in which the concerns of adult life, especially death, are played out in a visual language drawn from children’s picture books and pantomimes.
Part game, part improvisation, Quizoola! is a six hour durational performance based on a text of 2000 questions
Perhaps the first ever guided tour of Sheffield, Nights in This City was a performance with both audience and performers on board a moving bus.
A map of the period between 1984 and 1994 — a map that is at the same time accurate, haunted, fictitious and false.
Dreams' Winter was the first major site-specific performance by Forced Entertainment, designed for and inspired by the Manchester Central Library building.
An installation that conjures a vast imaginary city using model buildings, street indexes and photography.
“Long ago and far away there was a country and all the people that lived there were a bunch of fucking cunts…”
A series of images shot in the bland anonymous interior of a Novotel, exploring the relationship between the present and recreated events from the past.
Speak Bitterness shows a group of penitents whose enormous task it is to confess to everything
“I’ve shot up this stuff that makes time run fast-forwards and now it’s starting to take effect...”
Who would one ask to think about the future? What might they think? And how might they tell it in the body?
"There are stains on the page, which I believe are her tears…”
12 am: Awake & Looking Down, is a physical and visual performance that explores the relation between object and label, image and text
An exploration of the group’s obsession with identity as a shifting, contradictory site and with the strangely charged act of naming and renaming.
“In the summer when the earth changed, it rained for five months and on the night the rain stopped, a silence fell like we’d woke up in a silence from a dream…”
Marina & Lee begins with a physics lecture from a woman in a shop-girl's overalls.
A (rather unlikely) Elvis Presley impersonator in Birmingham, England performs his act on a tacky nightclub stage.
Three drunks in bad wigs and jumble-sale clothes enact endlessly the events surrounding the supposed or imagined death of one of their friends.
“Part two was also their heartache for the city outside. They named it & renamed it every day despite the bitter cold…”
Shapes and gestures of a narrative are replayed and turned into a kind of minimal choreography.
Three performers use choreographed gestures and narrative moments from gangland interrogation scenes.
In a silent, minimalist choreography, the piece explores sexual identity and our relationship to images from the media.
The first performance by Forced Entertainment, Jessica established many of the motifs and strategies that would be present in the work for the next five years.
