Everything Must Go
Created 2026
Back to projectsEverything is a joke, but nothing is funny. Or everything is funny, and nothing is joke.
Late night in a bar that doesn’t really exist, dreams, tears, drinks and words are overflowing.
Forced Entertainment’s 2026 production Everything Must Go, forms the final part of their loose trilogy using AI voices and lip sync. With six performers onstage – the regular team joined once again by performer Seke Chimutengwende – this new work is the culmination of Forced Entertainment’s critical investigation into the relation between human beings, and the phantom presences and desires produced by the capitalist machine.
Where 2024’s Signal to Noise majored on looping, Everything Must Go sees the group sculpt everyday language into a subversive, Dada-istic poetics, at once comical and furious. In the performance the disembodied articulations and algorithmic expressions conjured in Tim Etchells’ texts, meet the dynamic, lively, sweating and occasionally exhausted forms of the Forced Entertainment performers.
The late-night tangle of bar room voices prompts a compelling physical and visual performance, a choreographic ebb and flow in which strands of narrative and character emerge, taking Forced Entertainment’s portrait of the contemporary moment into new theatrical and intellectual territory.
Meanwhile, the world beyond the bar location haunts Everything Must Go like a ghost that can’t be dispelled. Something went wrong out there; economy tanked, burned or run to ruins, cities and highways sluiced thick with the mud. People are talking in circles and the circles always, without question, come back to the same place.
Here.
credits
Conceived and devised by the company
Director Tim Etchells
Devised and performed by Robin Arthur, Seke Chimutengwende, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden & Terry O’Connor
Text, Music Composition and Sound Design Tim Etchells
Stage Design Richard Lowdon
Production Management Jim Harrison
Producer Eileen Evans
Everything Must Go is a Forced Entertainment production
Co-produced by Factory International, Manchester; Festival d’Avignon; Hebbel An Ufer, Berlin; Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main; PACT Zollverein, Essen; Spring Festival, Utrecht.