Forced Entertainment
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The members of the English company Forced Entertainment would feel right at home at the special alternative service. Really, all of what used to be called the avant-garde would. Like me and my problem Jews, they insist on making the same critique over and over again.
Consider First Night, which Forced Entertainment performed during its engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Created in 2001 as a commission for Dutch and German presenters, First Night confronts us with a troupe of eight old-style music hall performers wearing loud clothes, garish makeup, and smiles so wide and tight they look like they were fashioned in a wind tunnel. (Think Archie Rice, the doomed comic from John Osborne’s The Entertainer.) The troupe lines up onstage, apparently poised to commit an act of third-rate razzle-dazzle. But then something happens. They start channeling unseen conflicts, tapping into unexplained reservoirs of anger, despair, and confusion. Their ingratiating little showbiz turns devolve into displays of happy-faced cruelty or cheery dissociation, directed both at one another and at us. The emcee is held in a headlock as he tries to put a jolly spin on things. A clairvoyant moves from reading audience members’ thoughts about lost keys to predicting the manner of their deaths. A card trick mutates into a kind of rape. A comic starts jokes–a horse in a bar, seven nuns in a tub–that spin in wild circles away from their punch lines. An unctuous invitation to forget our troubles becomes an excruciating litany of them. “Try not to think about agonies and bitterness and smiles,” we’re told. “And sadness. And the kind of bitterness that comes from making one really big mistake. And the kind of regret that comes from making many many many many small mistakes…” There’s a whole section on the kinds of bombs we’re not supposed to think about.
