read more

Press

“Britain’s premier performance group (with) a patchwork of sights, sounds, sex and violence that sends the audience spinning.”
The Times

“embraces the focal points of love, identity, fragmentation and confession… through the bottom of Cathy and Sue’s pint glasses (and) a clever mix of film and soundtrack.”
Scotland on Sunday

‘Their work is by turn intelligent, ironic, honest, absurd, sobering, hilarious, mournful and moral. It is also occasionally wilfully silly, and sometimes deeply profound’
Sunday Herald

‘Using a largely improvised script, rough cut video footage and a slowed down disco soundtrack, Forced Entertainment recreates the delirious atmosphere of an evening at the local… just the tonic’
The List

‘Even when chaos appears rampant on stage, the truths and insights that spiral out of the seeming confusion are like heat-seeking missiles: moreover, they whiz past obvious targets and home in on the underbelly of our collusion in social injustice, prejudice, and the politics of self-interest and smugness.’
The Herald

‘new show from leading experimental theatre company, hanging out in a pub disco at the end of the world where the beer tastes like piss and the women talk dirty… Forced Entertainment celebrate 15 years of touring with the show to end all shows’
The Guardian

‘genuinely reflects the jumbled-up excitement of sprawling cities, late night adventures, bad TV and half-remembered stories. Fragmentation is their forte; delightfully reconstructed and shrouded in the need for love and confession. Like a well-deserved drink, it is best to simply enjoy it for what it is: a curious collection of people and moments underpinned by nakedly perceptive dialogue which makes you realise just how mad the world really is.’
Metro

‘a performance art window into the psychology of Bacchanalian excess’
The Scotsman

Programme notes and essays

Read an essay on Disco Relax by Forced Entertainment’s Artistic Director Tim Etchells from Certain Fragments here.

A late night channel hop.  A swirl of fragments.  A bloke plays electric guitar.

"The process they used was chaotic, exploratory, blundering.  A question of going into the rehearsal room and waiting for something to happen.  Waiting for something that amused, scared, hurt, provoked or reduced one to hilarity.  A starting point could be anything - a record, a second hand suit of a particular kind, a list of different kinds of silence, two scenes from a soap opera, a blackboard, the gesture of someone they had seen in the street, a hasty construction of a space in which to work - any of these things could be a major clue, alone, or in some unexpected combination.  It was important that no one did their homework too well - that no element of the theatrical language might substantially precede any other - so that any element could lead."

A late night channel hop.  A swirl of fragments.  A bloke plays electric guitar.

In rehearsal the performers are talking but the words are scrambled, distorted, misheard.  A tangle of cables is trailed across the stage, plug-boards and fairy lights, red florescent tubes.  A kind of home-made brutalist lighting show with pub rocker soundtrack.  The energy is laconic, laid back, ridiculous.  More like roadies than performers they look like they just got their stuff from a transit van.  The strangest support act in a pub-cum-club you don't remember.

Later, after improvisations have ended for the day, we make a list of imaginary soap-operas - Amateur Hospital, Only The Vermin, Hung Jury and Motherfucker Island.  And Sue reads from the text, in best mock lawyer speak:

“Your honour. What is justice?  What is the name of the law?  What is evidence?  What is the foolishness of men?  What is truth and beauty?  What is a crime when men themselves? What is hope in it?  What is a way out?  And like what then for the future of this and other things?”

Disco Relax is a distorted slice of contemporary life played backwards and surreal.  A plunge into the dark water of made-up soaps, drunk pub stories, incomprehensible boasts and strange intimate conversations.

The neighbours in the downstairs flat are arguing - you can't hear the words exactly but from the rhythms and the energy you know the content and the feeling very well.  Tuning in, tuning out.  You wake to find the tv on, an Italian channel in some Austrian hotel room, and for a moment, before you're properly awake you are sure that you can understand the words.  Blurred pictures.  Fragments of narrative.  A bloke plays electric guitar.

Someone tells a story, disconnected from its set-up, never reaching its conclusion.  The last scene takes place in Disco Relax.

Tim Etchells
Sheffield 1999