Tim Etchells, from the award-winning theatre group Forced Entertainment, explains the joys of performing in six -hour storytelling marathon, And on the Thousandth Night…
Forced Entertainment's And on the Thousandth Night. Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning
Given its improvisational, marathon character And on the Thousandth Night… is hard to prepare for and often hard to remember. And On the Thousandth Night… (or The Kings, as we’ve come to call it at Forced Entertainment) is a free-for-all, governed by a simple set of rules; other than “having a think about stories you might try to tell”, any work in advance is pretty sure to bite the dust as eight performers, all wearing makeshift king costumes, jostle for space. The main rule (and arguably the only important one) is that no story is ever allowed to finish, since any performer who is speaking may be interrupted at any moment by another player, who’ll use the word “stop” to halt the narrative and claim the stage for their own story. It makes for what you might call a cut-throat playfulness.
Performing is always a three-way balancing act between the ideas you can think of at any given moment, the lurching mood or dynamics of the performance itself, and your own shifting state of tongue-tiedness or exhaustion-inspired lucidity. You may plan to embark on a slow-burning horror story, but at that particular moment your colleagues’ mood could be for short, comic tales involving depressed kings or sex-crazed plumbers. In this context, your tale can be stopped the moment you start.
At other times, you’ll find yourself venturing a whimsical one-liner about a talking dog, or a love letter that gets lost in the post, only to find that here, where you least want it, your colleagues allow you to take the stage and don’t interrupt you for a long time. Sometime towards midnight you could be treading the shallow water of a story that lacks purpose or direction, begging silently for the “stop” to end your misery. More often than not, no such luck; there’s more amusement in letting you hang.
Looking back on the show is always tricky. You’re aware of mood swings and flows of energy, periods of elation and laughter, or places where time seemed to crawl past, minute by minute. You’re dizzy with the volume of words, awhirl with fragments of unfinished tales. Fittingly, perhaps, almost no complete narratives will remain. Perhaps only assorted fragments of gay soldiers and pirates, wizards in forests, cleaners in offices, murderous children, philosophical robots, tyrannical despots, lost knights and adulterous travelling salesmen…
Tim Etchells
Artistic Director, Forced Entertainment
A longer version of Tim Etchells’ blog was originally published in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/apr/13/tim-etchells-on-performance-improv-storytelling
Forced Entertainment perform And on the Thousandth Night… at the Howard Assembly Room on Saturday 26 November, presented as part of the Compass Festival of Live Art. The piece is a 6 hour durational theatre performance, throughout which audience members are free to come and go as they please. For more information and to book tickets, click here.
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Posted on November 1, 2011
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