[forced entertainment playing in Bergen this weekend]
Remember Surrender Control? The SMS piece back in 2001 where you “surrendered control” to your mobile and received SMSes telling you what to do for three days? Tim Etchells, the author of that, has no doubt done many other things since, but I’d lost track of him until I got an email from Bergen International Theatre about the Meteor Festival this weekend a play he’s written, using texts by French performance artist Sophie Calle, is being performed by the British theatre group Forced Entertainment as part of . According to the Meteor site, Guardian Review wrote of the piece: “The marriage of Calle’s text with Tim Etchell’s minimalist, utterly uncompromising production is heavensent … I cannot recommend it strongly enough.” I guess I’ll go see it.
October 9th, 2007 at 17:47
yes, me too will go and see - “the insiders of the theatre” say
that forced entertainment is the best you can watch on any stage
at this time.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:57
[…] Last night I saw Exquisite Pain, the play I was looking forward to. I did not enjoy it. I really should have read more reviews before going - this deliberately tedious piece consists simply of two actors sitting at two desks on a stage and taking turns to read stories of “my greatest suffering”. The woman reads 60 or so repetitions of the same story of a breakup, with slight variations. The breakup was Sophie Calle’s, and happened in 1985, and each retelling begins the same way, more or less: “Five days ago, the man I love left me.” “Six days ago, the man I love left me.” Until finally, we get to “Ninety-eight days ago, the man I used to love left me.” The retellings are slightly different from each other and there is some relief - about thirty or so days in she’s finally angry with him. By sixty days in she’s less engaged in the story. By eighty days in she just repeats the same mundane details of the room it happened in, the date, the barest details. […]