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A theatre maker’s theatre maker, Tim Etchells and his company, Forced Entertainment, have existed long enough for their non-hierarchical approach to become radical again. By Jana Perković.

Theatre maker Tim Etchells on radical storytelling

Theatre maker Tim Etchells.

Credit: Amy Gibson

Tim Etchells was in his fourth decade working in theatre when he decided to tackle something novel: Shakespeare. “We didn’t know half of it,” he says. “It was really interesting to get this crash course in Shakespeare.”

The “we” he is referring to is Forced Entertainment, Etchells’ theatre company, which is bringing its Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare to the Rising festival in Melbourne next month. They are a stable group of six artists who have been making shows together since graduating from Exeter University in the 1980s.

Even though Etchells is alone when he speaks to me, zooming in from his home in Britain, the ensemble has an invisible presence in our conversation. Etchells also refers to them – Cathy Naden, Claire Marshall, Robin Arthur, Terry O’Connor and Richard Lowdon – invariably as “people”. As in when he says: “In a few cases, people had studied specific Shakespeare plays, but many were plays that were new to us.” He stops, adds: “For us, it was another world. We’d never really done anything with plays.”

Etchells is a theatre maker’s theatre maker. In the same way certain comedians command considerable admiration among peers for their mastery of craft, “Forced Ents” is widely admired in theatre circles for their willingness to intentionally break some of the most fundamental rules of storytelling onstage. They may not be a household name, but their work has been the subject of at least seven books and thousands of academic articles.

“It’s always theatre about theatre – going wrong,” says David Williams, Australian performance-maker and academic, who wrote his PhD on Forced Entertainment. “They make things go wrong – and they make a spectacle out of this failure.”

Forced Entertainment shows are often, to paraphrase George Costanza, shows about nothing. The driving conceit is usually that the promised show will not or cannot happen. The reasons given for this will vary. Sometimes performers appear to have wandered in from another show, all hyped up to deliver something other than what the show requires. (“They are the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, and yet must carry on going through the motions,” is how Williams has described it.) Sometimes the actors seem embittered and jaded, deliberately unwilling to commit to their role.

Other times, they seem simply inept: their skits deliberately fail, they forget their jokes. In And on the Thousandth Night…, performers start telling stories only to be interrupted by each other. Over the course of the show, hundreds, if not thousands, of stories begin, but not one is allowed to finish – as if Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller were turned into durational theatre. They have performances that last hours, from six or 12 to 24: here, it’s crippling exhaustion (of both performers and spectators) that undermines the show.

The company has had its champions from the get-go. Speaking to theatre critic Lyn Gardner in 2004, Philip Bither, of the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, raved about the group’s “immediacy, the danger, the electricity, the barely controlled chaos”. He described it as “what I had dreamed the theatre of our times could feel like”.

For an unsuspecting theatre audience, this deconstructive effort hasn’t always landed well. For a long time, Forced Ents were dismissed as juveniles from Sheffield who simply didn’t know how to make good theatre. At the company’s first visit to Australia, in 2004 for the Adelaide Festival, reviews judged their show First Night as “bad entertainment”, “incompetent variety act”, “drivel”. Williams remembers: “I had never seen so many audience members walk out.” One critic wrote: “[A] bigger waste of time this Festival I’ve yet to come across.”

Williams, on the other hand, was electrified. “It was a pretty revelatory experience, as an artist, to see their work.” He thought they dealt so elegantly with common risks in theatre, “things that ‘good’ theatre can’t touch – death, failure, ugliness”. He ordered all the Forced Ents show recordings from their website – on VHS – and played them to his friends at house parties.

History has been kind to Forced Entertainment. As the company celebrates their 40th anniversary, their influence is everywhere – in Australia, from the works of performance collectives such as Appelspiel, APHIDS and Post, to the deconstructive comedy of Zoë Coombs Marr and Hannah Gadsby. While many of their peer group have long become history-book material, Forced Ents’ repertoire works are looking fresher and fresher – remarkable considering their early shows were a rebellion against Thatcherism, television and the like. What does it mean, Etchells asked in 1997, to have seen “only two real dead bodies, and yet thousands upon thousands of TV corpses?” This may seem like a quaint danger in the age of deepfakes, AI and bot swarms that undermine entire elections – but the concern with finding some solid ethical ground in a cacophony of competing narratives has never felt more relevant.

“We found a way to have a formal range, and permission to do different kinds of things,” says Etchells when I ask him about Forced Entertainment’s remarkable longevity. “That’s why I think we’ve survived internally: it’s still an adventure.”

The group was formed in 1984, when Etchells and five university mates moved to Sheffield to start a theatre company. They moved into two share houses down the road from each other and found a rehearsal space in a factory squat. It was, in his words, “a pretty extraordinary and, in a way, foolish decision”. But it was “a move against London, the same way that people today might move to Detroit or Marseille. Sheffield doesn’t have the glamour of either of those, but it was not a bad place to be.” The region was widely known as the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. “It was a socialist stronghold with a very progressive set of policies on unemployment, and subsidised public transport and so on. And it had an energy, a fantastic music scene.” Jarvis Cocker was a neighbour.

They didn’t know anybody, but living was cheap, so they had time. It allowed them to get on with their work, which Etchells describes as “doing stupid things very seriously”. “If we had gone to London, I think we would have really struggled financially and we would have been distracted.”

The group devised performances collectively, with modest project funding, sharing both creative ownership and proceeds from the box office. In the increasingly slick, spectacular, television- and media-driven theatre landscape, this approach seemed destined for extinction. Then something happened about 2008 that changed everything.

“We live streamed [our show] Speak Bitterness. It was early, very early, way before people did that.” It was a revelation.

Nascent social media, particularly early Twitter, gave Forced Entertainment shows a whole new dimension. Patrons would come and go in the theatre where the show was being performed, but people could also drop in and out online, chatting alongside the performance, exchanging comments, live-tweeting. “A theatre show, which starts at eight and finishes at half past nine, is a sealed object,” Etchells tells me. “But the long piece, where you can watch a bit, then go to the bar and chat with your friends – for those works, I think the internet worked really brilliantly.”

Live streams brought their works to the living rooms of enthusiasts far from their usual touring circuit and revealed a large and enthusiastic community of fans in places such as South America, the Midwest, or scattered across regional Australia. They pounced on the opportunity to participate in the collective vieworama, in a conversation, enabled by hashtags and retweets, with fellow fans across geographies and time zones.

In the heady, optimistic early years of social media, it felt extraordinary – a generational coming together, as if experimental theatre might usher in world peace. Particularly for those of us feeling isolated from theatre currents in the far-flung corners of the world, it was exhilarating. Etchells agrees. “That culture was quite particular and now it’s gone.” Twitter may have once been an open social space, “But of course it’s a toy of a billionaire fool these days.”

Live streaming revealed that Etchells’ sensibility could operate well in a variety of non-theatre settings. All kinds of new works came out of that, including his solo projects: surprising program notes and experimental pamphlets for theatre festivals, as well as projects such as Vacuum Days: 365 Tumblr posts over 2011, one a day for a whole year, each an announcement of an unlikely, improbable event inspired by current affairs. (A typical entry reads: “THE INEVITABLE RISE OF THE YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES / As Dramatised by Ex-Students of a Now Defunct Mime School”.)

Then there are “the neons”, glowing textual installations in public space, startling the passers-by with a carefully chosen phrase, such as WAIT HERE I HAVE GONE TO GET HELP or YOU WILL LIVE FOREVER. Artist Vlatka Horvat, Etchells’ partner and frequent collaborator, has called them questions, or “invitations: to think, to reflect, to contemplate, to imagine, to speculate, to connect things”. With the neons in particular, Etchells today has a vibrant side career as a successful visual artist.

“Partly, the interest for me was different ways to make connections with audiences,” Etchells tells me. “In the theatre, you can only talk to the people who come through the door. The great thing with live streaming or the work in public space is that, potentially, anybody can walk by. And that’s a joy. It’s an amazing opportunity to connect and touch their lives.”

And, of course, it led to live streaming the complete works of Shakespeare. Each performer tackled six plays and they were performed at a table with household objects. Each play has its own cast: some are aesthetically pleasing, others have amusing double entendres. Jago is played by a cigarette packet; Hamlet is a bottle of vinegar. “It’s a work that has this kids’ puppet theatre vibe,” Etchells says. “But it also always, for me, had the sort of YouTube tutorial vibe. A ‘How to fix your vacuum cleaner’ video vibe. You know, somebody sat at a table with a load of stuff, talking about it.”

The first iteration was at the Foreign Affairs festival in Berlin in 2015, where the plays were performed one after another over the course of nine days, centrestage, with careful sound and lighting design. The second came during the pandemic, when Forced Ents performed the whole cycle of plays once again, this time from their kitchens. The latter version is vulnerable and full of care; the first is solemn, strong. Both are unexpectedly compelling.

“There’s an absurdity to the project, it’s comical, it’s a stupid idea,” Etchells muses. “It’s also incredibly effective and intimate, and audiences really lean into it. It’s a very direct encounter with the performers. And you get these stories, which are amazing, and clunky, and ridiculous, and you get a vision of the plays not as plays but, you know, more as clockwork mechanisms.”

There was a time, not long ago, when Forced Entertainment’s approach – described by Etchells as “collective authorship, collective ownership, working together, owning the work together, making all the decisions together” – seemed hopelessly outdated. Today, he tells me, there is renewed interest in their way of working. “A lot of people are talking about how to work non-hierarchically, about models of cooperation – that’s what we’ve been doing as a collective for more than 40 years.”

How does he feel, I ask him at the end, about Forced Entertainment’s place in the world today? “Mainstream theatre has opened its doors a bit,” he tells me, “but it’s still very literary, it’s still theatre about what the author has got to tell you.” The world may have moved on, but the British theatre establishment, Etchells implies, stands still. “We’re still outsiders. We’re still an alternative. We’re still another way of thinking about what theatre could be.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 24, 2025 as "Writing a wrong".

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