Cold Sweat

Created 2025

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Cold Sweat is a new theatre work from Forced Entertainment, with original texts and sound from the group’s artistic director Tim Etchells.

Layering music loops with AI-generated voices, the performance sees members of the group return to the lip-syncing mode of their epic Signal to Noise, mapping their bodies to the strange rhythms and tonalities that the nonhuman voices produce.

There are stories, questions, and confrontations, fragments of a drama bound together by a mood of emotional and physical overload. The figures onstage are channeling confusion, struggling to articulate desires, dreams and uncertainties, looping their way through speeches and statements that shift uneasily between heartfelt revelation and the recitation of cliches.

We are in play of some kind. Or a TV soap. Everything is a joke, but nothing is funny. Or everything is funny, and nothing is a joke. Through the layers of irony, through the walls of borrowed sound, through the mask of Forced Entertainment’s virtuoso performances, something real is trying to emerge.

credits

Cold Sweat is a Forced Entertainment Production. Co-produced by KONTRÄR, Stockholm, Sweden and with the support of Théâtre de la Commune, Paris, France

Director Tim Etchells

Devised with and performed by Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall and Terry O’Connor

Text, composition and sound design Tim Etchells

Stage Design Richard Lowdon

Lighting Design Jim Harrison

Production Management Jim Harrison

Producer Eileen Evans

Premiere 22-21 November 2025 Théâtre de la Commune, Paris, France