We are delighted to welcome Forced Entertainment to Athens for the second year running. After their first appearance in Greece last March with their performance Quizoola!, they return to Bios for the Greek premiere of their latest work Void Story, first performed at the Spill Festival in London in April 2009.

THE GROUP
2009 marked Forced Entertainment’s 25th anniversary. Since forming the company on graduation from Exeter University in 1984, the six core members of the group have sustained a unique artistic partnership for a quarter of a century, confirming time and again their position as trailblazers in contemporary theatre.

The company’s substantial canon of work reflects an interest in the mechanics of performance, the role of the audience and the machinations of contemporary urban life. The work – framed and focused by Artistic Director Tim Etchells – is distinctive and provocative, delighting in disrupting the conventions of theatre and the expectations of audiences. Forced Entertainment’s trademark collaborative process – devising work as a group through improvisation, experimentation and debate – has made them pioneers of British avant-garde theatre and earned them an unparalleled international reputation.

THE PERFORMANCE
Void Story follows a beleaguered pair of protagonists on a rollercoaster ride through the decimated remains of contemporary culture. Navigating one terrible cityscape after another, mugged, shot at and bitten by insects, pursued through subterranean tunnel systems, stowed away in refrigerated transport, shacked up in haunted hotels and lost in wildernesses, backstreets and bewildering funfairs, they travel to the centre of a night so intense that there are no stars to be seen.

Forced Entertainment perform this bleak and comical modern fable as if it were a radio play, sitting at tables, turning the pages of the script, ‘doing’ the requisite voices and adding in sound effects. Simultaneously the stage is dominated by a series of projected images, a storyboard for an impossible movie-version of Tim Etchells’ unsettling text. Somewhere between the live dialogue, the recorded sound effects and the collaged images is where Void Story actually takes place.

The performance is in English.