The Coming Storm

It is not one, but a whole entanglement of stories on which Forced Entertainment's new creation, The Coming Storm, is based. A way for the Sheffield collective to explode the narration, question the sources and the structure of our stories, but also to ponder the theatre form. Some of these stories presented by the actors are real, others invented. Some of them are presented as the script of an imaginary film, some echo the plots of classic novels; others twist fairy tales or are inspired by tales from folklore. Using procedures that come from amateur dramatics, song and naïve dance, the six actor-performers of Forced Entertainment stage a tangle of patched-up stories that, all together, form an epic tale, a saga that decidedly becomes too large for the dimensions of the stage. This unwieldy narrative is absurd, contradictory and threatens to fall apart at any moment as it is overwritten, and cannibalized. In a style as resolutely inventive as it is falsely clumsy, theatrical tricks give way to broken dances, pieces of live music and increasingly frantic attempt to give substance to this blackly but terribly comic haunting tale. LP