Review: FORCED ENTERTAINMENT: SIGNAL TO NOISE, Queen Elizabeth Hall

The Sheffield-based ensemble Forced Entertainment are celebrating "40 years of tearing up the rulebook" with a London season that runs to 23 November.

My previous acquaintance with the group and the work they have produced for both live performances and digital projects left me both excited and apprehensive to see what they have done in this new show, Signal To Noise.

A collaboration between the six performers and artistic director Tim Etchells, and with dramaturgical input from associate artist Tyrone Huggins, this is all about voices, AI ones to be specific, and how the show evolves through engagement with these voices through lip synching.

The "disembodied, never-bodied speakers" noted in the show's blurb allow performances carefully improvised and crafted through rehearsal to both frustrate and engage the audience. Men speak in women's voices. Robotic tones are conveyed with the sunniest of smiles. Anecdotes and mundane sentences are repeated over and over then reappear in fragments later on.

Having worked together for four decades, the core team of Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O'Connor display a vibrant shorthand with each other, their practice of pretence and provocation challenging us to look, experience, and reflect.

With them, regular guest artist Seke Chimutengwende adds an additional level of absurdity, not afraid to push at the boundaries of what we perceive when we hear spoken words. It's a heady mix.

There are numerous costume changes, clearly fake wigs, and a sense of chaos in the design in which chairs, pot plants, buckets, ladders and more are constantly on the move. Signal To Noise is about the noise of the everyday and the fragments that shape our understanding of life. A quick snatch of a conversation, a story that sounds the same but acquires a different meaning through its visual delivery.

The physical side is not forgotten either, and the fourth wall is often broken as the audience becomes a complicit, if occasionally confused, participant in what we see. It's hard to look away. Even though the show revolves around speech, music, and other sound effects, it is accessible to those with hearing loss as captions above the stage transcribe everything.

Through the dances, arguments, mundane tales and profound reflections, we are invited to turn our view of the world on its head. Where there is a problem with the connection, there may be a problem with our own communication.

Each performer has their own style, whether very open and unleashed, or closed-off and cautious. Their bodies respond to the words they choose to lip synch, their movements either complementing or at odds with the speech. It isn't an easy watch, but it isn't meant to be.

For Forced Entertainment, a linear story or a place without the space to play would be unthinkable. Their aim is to connect people, provoke them, make them think and react. As the programme puts it, "40 years insisting that ... form is content ... movement is performance ... performances that reach out, touch, confuse and entangle the spectator."

Signal To Noise is a piece of theatre like no other, with a high energy, teasing amusement, and a serious core. I highly recommend you try out this or one of the other shows in Forced Entertainment's London season, and let the creativity wash over you. You won't see anything else like this, and you will definitely come away with something to think about.

Signal To Noise is at Queen Elizabeth Hall until 11 October.

Forced Entertainment's London season continues with Go On Like This at the Purcell Room from 12-13 October, Shown and Told at The Place from 31 October - 2 November, L'Addition at Battersea Arts Centre from 5-16 November, and If All Else Fails at Battersea Arts Centre from 19-23 November.

Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning

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