Terry O’Connor from Forced Entertainment on… Coming Home

Terry O’Connor is a founder member of Sheffield-based theatre company Forced Entertainment, whose 2009 production Void Story is part of Sheffield Theatres’ Forge Festival.
Forced Entertainment have an international reputation, touring theatres across Europe since the mid-Eighties.

More than a quarter of a century ago, a group of six Exeter University Drama and English students formed what would become one of the most enduring companies in UK theatre. Based in Sheffield, Forced Entertainment has been showing their work in the UK, Europe and beyond since the mid-eighties. Ahead of a performance of Void Story at Sheffield’s Forge Festival, Forced Entertainment’s Terry O’Connor took time out to discuss performing in their adopted hometown and the secret behind the company’s longevity.

Terry O’Connor is one of six founding members of Forced Entertainment, who have been performing as a company since 1984. According to the group, their aim is to ‘explore what theatre and performance can mean in contemporary life’. Their ideas have not only been developed as performance works, but also in a variety of other forms such as gallery installations, site-specific pieces and videos.

According to O’Connor, “one thing that has kept us together is the way in which each show is an opportunity to break open the possibilities of theatre or performance, break them down to their basic elements and build them up again in a way that fits each project.” After so long she is clearly still enthusiastic about this “radical way of working” and admits that these “bigger questions about making theatre…has enabled us to work together as artists”, adding that the “conversation that comes with that is a hard one to give up”.

While they all originally met while studying at Exeter University, it was Sheffield that became their home base, even though none of the members were familiar with the city at that time. However, according to O’Connor they were drawn to its “musical heritage”, as well as its status “outside of Thatcherite Britain” which made it a “kind of independent self-proclaimed socialist republic of South Yorkshire”.

She adds: “Across filmmaking, fine art and music, there was this feeling that you could just do it, you didn’t have to wait for someone to fund you to do it. There was a real grass-roots level of artistic production that we felt we could fit into.”

Of course, success takes time and O’Connor admits the first two years were spent “on the dole”. However, she believes that this period helped in the company’s development, as they realised that “the commitment to making theatre was something that was going to take all our time even if it originally couldn’t pay us any money.” She adds that, by comparison, “it’s very hard for people these days to think about setting up a company where they’re working together and trying to fit it around other money-paying jobs”.

That the move to Sheffield was a good decision appears borne out by the subsequent success the company experienced, not only at home but also internationally. Forced Entertainment has been touring overseas since shortly after their formation in 1984. O’Connor says: “I think we were fantastically gratified, and to some extent surprised, when in 1986/87 we started to get invited to take the work to Holland and Belgium really quite early on in our development.” She also goes on to cite the “fantastic support” the company has received from continental Europe over the past decade. In addition they have toured in Australia, Canada, Japan and the US. However, O’Connor adds: “We spend a long time rehearsing in Sheffield, but we spend so much touring elsewhere it’s always a really fantastic thing to bring our work back home.”

Forced Entertainment is indeed soon returning home to present one of their latest works, Void Story, at Sheffield’s Forge Festival on 26 May. It follows a pair of protagonists ‘on a rollercoaster ride through the decimated remains of contemporary culture’ and is performed in the style of a radio play, complete with sound effects, while the actors are seated at a table turning over pages in the script. Simultaneously, projected images show a storyboard for an imagined movie version.

The idea was developed following an invitation by Robert Pacitti to be part of London’s 2009 SPILL festival. The venue was to be the small, intimate Soho Theatre. O’Connor says, “we started to talk about what would work in the space and found ourselves moving towards a kind of staged radio play…The text itself emerged through a combination of (artistic director Tim Etchells’) writing and group discussion”. She adds that the piece is a “kind of cartoon narrative with a high turnover of events”.

O’Connor continues: “Tim started working on images constructed quite crudely in Photshop, cut and pasting mismatched components of pictures to accompany the dialogue, mixing up scale, leaving some parts of the image blank…and we projected these on to a large screen.” Overall, she believes “the audience’s experience of the story occurs somewhere between the strands of these performative and technical elements; the voices, the sound effects, the images and the very workaday presence of the performers”.

After five nights at the Soho Theatre, Forced Entertainment took Void Story on tour to Europe, which leads to the question of how a show like this translates to an overseas audience. Indeed, O’Connor says that there is often doubt over whether the “linguistic intricacies” of the English language are going to “carry perfectly” across the Channel. In fact, she says, “in Turin…and Paris they asked for subtitles”, something that the group wasn’t sure would work, but in the end “proved to be quite an exciting element” to the piece. She adds: “I think this is the first show I’ve been involved in where you can sometimes get the audience laughing at sound effects, not at lines or anything the performer’s doing; just the impact of the computerised sound effect.”

While the show has been performed in Glasgow, the Sheffield date will be the first back in England. O’Connor says that after touring for so long, “we’re really excited about putting Void Story in front of an English audience”, particularly, it seems, in Sheffield. “It always feels great to perform a new piece in Sheffield. There’s a community of other artists and makers who we’ve worked alongside for a long time.” She adds that the work “can sometimes seem like a conversation with the city itself, part of a seam of music and film and fine art that comes very specifically from Sheffield”.

– Terry O’Connor was speaking to Hannah Giles

More information about Forced Entertainment can be found at: www.forcedentertainment.com/

For further details of the Forge Festival, see www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk, or contact the box office on 0114 249 6000