Hi Tim, how are you? Thanks so much for chatting to Stage to Page today! Would you mind introducing yourself and telling our readers how you first got into the theatre industry?

I’m going OK thanks, hope you are too. Busy, busy, but managing to stay afloat for now. As well as the solo stuff I do across a number of art forms – as a writer, and as a visual artist - I’m artistic director of Forced Entertainment, which is a collective, an ensemble of performance makers based in Sheffield. The group is 6 people - 5 performers and me – plus a small but brilliant office team. We’re interested to make things that explore and reinvent theatre… drawing on the strengths and inventiveness of the group and the guests we invite for different projects. It’s very much a collaborative project and process.

I went to a large comprehensive school that had no formal Drama offer, but there was an after-school Drama club run by an enthusiastic Geography teacher. That was the probably start – enthusiasm breeds enthusiasm I guess. After school I went to study theatre, at Exeter University – a brilliant course, very much focused on experiment. When the studies were done, I formed Forced Entertainment with a small group of friends, many of whom were ex-Drama students too. We moved, together, to Sheffield in the summer of 1984 and began the project of the company in earnest. We survived on the dole, did the Enterprise Allowance scheme twice. It was a Thatcherite scheme, concocted as a way of massaging the unemployment figures but it served well for many artists, theatre makers, writers and musicians who needed time and support when starting out on the path to make their own work. Slowly but surely we built a context – performing locally and then further afield. Support from UK funders, local and national was soon joined by support and interest from programmers and presenters in mainland Europe. We very rapidly established a model of international working. That was key… and remains key to the continuation of the group. British theatre is pretty conservative… and badly funded (a fatal combination!)… so getting out and about, seeing work and finding support in other countries has been really important.

Forced Entertainment is celebrating its 40th year this year. How are you celebrating and can you tell us about the journey you've been on with the company during this time?

We’re celebrating with a little bit of looking back… trying to underscore the story of this very experimental, group-based practice and how it's survived and prospered in a pretty inhospitable landscape. We’re also trying focus on the idea of alternative theatre histories – there’s so much emphasis on writing here, and we’re keen to speak instead about collectivity, about shared work, shared decision making and shared authorship. People talk a lot about other ways of doing things, and about non-hierarchical structures – we’ve been working that way since the 80s. It’s the ethos of the group.

True to form though, a key part of the celebration is new work rather than looking back. So we’re looking forwards from the 40 year mark! Every project for us is a new opportunity to investigate what theatre can do, what kind of contract it can have with audiences, how it can take them to new places.

New for 2024 is a production called Signal to Noise, it’s a very visual and physical piece, also one where sound plays an important part. There’s an original score made from all kinds of loops and samples, as well as a series of texts that are performed by AI voices… the performers are lip-syncing the text, which is quite a feat.

Alongside that new large scale work we’re also showing various other pieces. One through line in a lot of the programme is collaboration, so there are a handful of works that have arisen from encounters with other artists – a piece called L’Addition which I created with the performance duo Bert & Nasi, as well as collaborations between me and two brilliant and extremely renowned artists from other fields – the choreographer and dancer Meg Stuart and the percussionist Tony Buck. With all those pieces it’s a tremendous joy to be sharing ideas and stages with people who bring new perspectives and direction to the work. There’s also a piece created in a collaboration with dancer Seke Chimutengwende and Forced Entertainment founder and performer Cathy Naden. And finally there’s a work called 12am: Awake & Looking Down, a six hour long durational improvised performance which we first created and showed in 1992.

As Artistic Director, how do you maintain creativity and where do you find inspiration from?

I probably read, listen to music, go to galleries more than I go to theatre – and at theatre’s it’s often the dance program I’m drawn to! I guess there’s something there about being inspired by things that are off at an angle to what I do.

The other thing of course is that the world itself is inspiring – what’s going on, where we’re headed. We would never make a work with an announced topic – responding to a particular event or situation for example. But at the same time we do see the rehearsal room as a kind of divining instrument – spending time in the studio for is a form of making, and a form of listening… so the idea is that through the process we come to material and to questions that are pertinent, of the moment, reflections that make sense of, or fit with the moment in interesting ways. When we are working we are never sure what we are looking for…. It’s something that comes through the process. The shows emerge from the time we spend rehearsing, from conversations and improvisations.

Can you tell us about the upcoming season in London from Forced Entertainment and the six productions you'll be showcasing?

It’s a wide range of pieces. Together they show some of the scope of what we do, lots of different angles and energies to engage with. I’m really proud of that.

Although the works are quite different in terms of scale and energy one thing that connects them is my desire to work between the comical and the serious, especially this edge where you’re not sure, as an audience member how to take what's happening. I love to find this shifting ground between laughter and unease.

A question I ask everyone we chat to - my blog is called Stage to Page. But if you could turn any book, from page to stage, what would it be and why?

Our main focus is on original work – by which we mean going into the studio without a concrete starting point and just exploring our way forwards. For that reason we’ve done relatively little in the way of adaptation, though there have been a couple of projects that fie that form notably Exquisite Pain, based on a project by the French artist Sophie Calle, and The Notebook, based on an extraordinary novel by the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof. Right now there are two books on my ‘list’- in the sense of them being texts that I think it could potentially be interesting to work with. One is The Employees, by Danish author Olga Ravn – a philosophical science fiction book about a space ship haunted by disturbing upheavals after it takes on board a cargo of strange objects, and the other is Alphabetical Diaries by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, a book which as the title suggests, comprises ten years of diary entries, broken down into individual sentences, edited, and re-sequenced alphabetically. What these two books have in common is that the language is simple and vivid, and that there are no naturalistic scenes to enact – they’re powerful and the same time mundane, undramatic acts of narration, and that’s something I really like to work with.

And finally, why should anyone reading this book tickets to a Forced Entertainment show this year?

Forced Entertainment is a long-running, European theatre company that happens to be based in Sheffield, UK. It’s made a significant and original contribution to the field of contemporary performance which was recognised already in 2016 when the group won the International Ibsen Award. The work is uncompromising, unique, odd, challenging. It’s also funny and it’s interested in the encounter with audiences.

Or maybe say that in another way - it’s work that changes people, gets under their skinsssss, gets them thinking in new ways. What better reason could there be than that?

You can find out more about Forced Entertainment, here.