Bloody Mess has been created to celebrate twenty years of experimental theatre by the group Forced Entertainment. Tim Etchells for the Company outlined its underlying philosophy in the programme leaflet: "I think, maybe, we have got closer than ever before to a certain dream that of making a work which on the surface seems to be quite out of control and cannot be successfully turned into a story and yet, at the same time functions effectively at every level." He later goes on to say: "For us, the mess and its structured exuberance is something of a manifesto; an insistence that theatre can be more than drab story or literary rhetoric, that its heart lies in play, in liveness and in the event." In this Etchells evokes memories of the Italian improvised Harlequinade comedies that resisted hard being transformed, and replaced, by the structured theatre of Goldoni in the 18th century. However, the difference between the Italian comedy and Forced Entertainment is that the subjects touched upon in Bloody Mess are more pretentious.
      Broadly speaking Bloody Mess is a series of tableaux about actors making a play. The drama attempts self-reflection. In the opening scene two clowns differ about the positioning of chairs, and eventually their dispute becomes animated. Then, the acting team lines up on chairs, now in the front of the performing area, and announce the roles they are going to play. Here irony enters, as the actors who assume very anonymous personalities describe roles that their presentation could not hope to achieve. Richard wants to be thought of as a hero, Clare a sex symbol, Gerry (or Jerry) the 'star', and so on. Thereafter as each tableau appears some linking jokes recur, such the overfilling of a glass of water, a character pouring water all over herself, a sound engineer repeatedly testing a microphone, a boringly long story being perpetually interrupted, and a dry ice machine belching stage-smoke as a critical commentary and a way of scaring off the character dressed in a gorilla suit. At times the dialogue and actions attempt dramatic irony, such as when, in the scene after the characters-on-chairs' identification, one of the women appears to die on the stage and her friend cannot raise the awareness of those around who are too absorbed in what they are doing to notice. Later on, there is an extended scene where two naked men, with stars almost hiding their 'wedding tackle', request different kinds of silence, each one more outrageous than the last, to which the ironic and incongruous response is always the anodyne and inappropriate "beautiful".
     The show plays for two hours and twenty minutes continuously, which is nearly two hours and twenty minutes too long. Occasionally amidst the frantic attempts to be 'serious' ("Don't do the silence after the nuclear bomb has gone off" "beautiful") some quite good ideas peeped through the extended longueurs; but nothing was developed or explored. The whole show never managed to move beyond sustained superficiality and self-indulgent fooling around. If wit was intended, even funny slapstick humour, the pace of the show was far too slow and the aimed for ironies far too obvious and laboured. The actors might have had fun, but some of the audience found it too much and left early.
      Overall this show smacks too much of being an extended workshop, which is fine for participants. But like listening to scales being practiced, or elaborate vocalizes, or daubs on a palette to mix colours, this kind of thing is better enjoyed in private by consenting adults. Bloody Mess it truly was.
Roderick Swanston