Recently, March 22nd to be precise, Forced Entertainment live streamed their performance of And on the Thousandth Night… from Lisbon, I watched enthralled as these great theatre makers made stuff up, on the spot, for six hours. The basic premise of the show, which has now been performed for over fourteen years, is that a performer tells stories into a microphone until another performer interrupts them with a story of their own. The result is a great mass of individual narratives very few of which ever receive their ending, some last for minutes and others just a few seconds. Often they are interconnecting so that rather than being hundreds of completely isolated narratives each one is related so that each new story is a direct result of what has come before.
In the above clip the final story about the restaurant in the desert acts as the punch line to Tim Etchell’s slightly earlier story about the man searching for water. This is theatre that is not afraid to reveal its influences or its craft. None of these performers know what the next five minutes will hold and that means when something works, as it does at the end of this clip, the effect is all the more wonderful. The Audience is expecting chaos and is given something else entirely.
For me it asked a lot of questions about how we structure our own show, how we create narrative and create excitement out of spontaneity. For me the greatest benefit of a devising process is that so much can go wrong, but occasionally something goes wrong in a wonderful way. I have attempted in some ways to facilitate this in the way I structure rehearsal. Often there is very little set direction for a rehearsal, I will go in with an intentionally vague idea of what we want to achieve.
Yesterday the task set out on our rehearsal schedule was simply to ‘create a new sequence on the theme of weddings and commitment’. What followed was four hours of, occasionally heated, discussion and workshop until finally we had settled on a concept we liked and some ideas on what would actually happen. The direction that we eventually took was more or less a complete surprise to everyone and I’m very glad to say much more interesting than anything I had considered leading up to the rehearsal. Some much loved ideas, including and long reference to The Wizard of Oz, fell to the wayside as we found other sources that served the new scene better.
I have found that most of the time a lack of structure gives better results this, is of course, a credit to everyone in the company who are not content with just performing but are working closely to create theatre that represents us. We achieve much better results by pooling our talents than by adhering to a script written before rehearsal.
One small example is the image below. In this rehearsal we were meant to be working a scene about break ups in preparing the space we accidentally made this and our Jozey captured this image which has become our central marketing image.
The real genius of And on Thousandth Night… is that it encapsulates the chaotic process which has made their work so successful and literally puts it on the stage for the audience to enjoy. We are attempting to capture that same chaotic force to make our theatre exciting, enjoyable and unpredictable.
Works Cited
Forced Entertainment (2010) And on the Thousandth Night. [online video] Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wCbCpODReU [Accessed 6 April].
