The trailer for Bloody Mess (available on www.forcedentertainment.com) begins with a sad sack in clown makeup, sitting in a cloud of fog. Then there's a man high kicking in slow motion, holding a big, silver star in the air. Then a depressed-looking woman, also in a billowing fog, with red makeup smeared on her cheeks. Theater can be boring, funny, thrilling, embarrassing—but it rarely looks so frightening. Bloody Mess also seems very serious, with potential for goofiness (intentional or otherwise) as well as scary freak-outs.
Forced Entertainment, the ensemble behind Bloody Mess, came together in 1984: six theater and art students in Sheffield, England, who shared common interests in performance, cinema, science fiction, painting, installations, comic books, etc. Tim Etchells, the group's director, says Forced Entertainment does theater that "is not Theatrical." (Actually, he says "theatrical-with-a-capital-T," and uses this construction a lot.) "We try to underplay the artiness, to use people on stage as people rather than Actors."
I ask if they're Serious. "I'm interested in things that are very funny that become awful and then become funny again, to have a conversation about what is acceptable—like, 'Am I allowed to laugh at this?' We're more trashy and playful, Serious but hiding it."
Etchells says the title, Bloody Mess, is a "manifesto." The piece uses clowns, divas, and other "'found types' we got picking through the cultural rubble, and slams them together on the stage." Two clowns enter to set up a row of chairs. Their bungling and bickering over where the chairs should go escalates into a violent battle, what Etchells calls "brutal slapstick." A diva enters, then two competing leading men who become roadies and want to turn the show into a heavy-metal gig (hence the fog machines). The diva plays dead on the floor, saying she wants to make the audience cry not just at the end of the performance, but "for the rest of their lives." Etchells's description of Bloody Mess wanders at this point, but he adds that it's two and a half hours long, without an intermission. "Sometimes you need to swim far enough in that you can't see the shore in either direction." Amen.
One review, by an academic at Coventry University in the UK, contained the following sentence: "We want to tell the manic cheerleader to shut up so that the clown can finish his story of the universe... and when the gorilla confronts us with the idea that we are thinking about fucking her, we want to apologize, make our excuses, and leave." Sounds like genius. Or a Hindenburg. Either way, it's daring and I can't wait to see it. 
