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The squeal monty >> Sheffield troupe confesses all our sins by AMY BARRATT
Explains director Tim Etchells: "The substance of the piece is that the performers confess to crimes both real and imaginary, big and small." Speak Bitterness was partly inspired by such historical events as China's cultural revolution. But more than that, it seems to be a summing up of the 20th century, from the horrors to the trivia. "The text is basically an enormous catalogue," says Etchells, "and it ranges from things as banal as 'we ate the last biscuit' to 'we burned people's faces off with a blowtorch.'" Etchells is conscious that when you describe the piece as "seven people seated at a big metal table strewn with papers, confessing," it doesn't sound all that dynamic or dramatic. He assures me, however, that, "it's not as dry as it might sound." The performers have a certain amount of freedom, within the overall structure of the piece, to rearrange the text and even make things up on the spot. The performers don't have conventional characters, but relationships do develop over the course of a performance, though not always the same ones from night to night. Because it's really never the same show twice, "it's actually very, very live in the dramatic sense," says Etchells. Because of the fluid nature of the piece, there's "a kind of freshness built into it, which means that it's one of the easier shows to keep doing." Speak Bitterness was first performed in 1995, and Forced Entertainment has moved on to several other pieces since then. "We've worked together as a group for 14 years, pretty well the same bunch of people," says Etchells. "My role is to direct and, very often, to write text. What we did with this one is that I wrote an initial amount of text, then several of the performers wrote more text, and then in rehearsal, everybody made up new things." The company does a lot of improvisation, which they capture on video and mine later for good bits. Eventually, the good bits add up to a show. "In Speak Bitterness," Etchells says, "the audience is very slightly lit with lights that hang down over the stage and over the auditorium. You're not allowed to forget that you're there. It is a work that asks you to think about your role as a spectator." He says that people watching this orgy of confession tend to start making up their own lists of "crimes" in their heads. "I think of the piece as seven performers who are trying to measure themselves against the crimes of the culture. There are a lot of things that you haven't done but might be capable of doing--you wonder whether there's a part of you that might have done that. In a sense that's what acting is all about, about trying to get in touch with bits of yourself that haven't come true. This is a very stripped down version of that: there's a sense that if (these actors) say all these things, then that implicates them in some small way in all of these crimes--big, small, ludicrous, comical, disgusting..." In a society obsessed with guilt, our own and everybody else's; in a world where people will say anything if they get to say it on TV, Speak Bitterness is the full monty of confession. Speak Bitterness, part of the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques, tonight through Saturday at 8pm at Usine C, 1345 Lalonde
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Those who saw the movie The Full Monty will remember Sheffield as an industrial town so depressed its men couldn't keep the shirts on their backs. Well, as we Montrealers know, where economies sag, the arts may flourish. So Sheffield's reputation as a major cutlery manufacturer may have waned, but its cultural industry--including thriving film and theatre scenes--is on the rise. Forced Entertainment, the Sheffield-based collective performing Speak Bitterness at the Théâtres du Monde festival this weekend, has been creating original shows since 1984 and making quite a reputation for itself in the U.K. and beyond.