An interview with Tim Etchells on AI, Shakespeare, and the 40-year evolution of a theatrical collective

When you’re thinking of what makes a typical theatre show, a few things may come to mind – a defined script, a clear storyline, realistic characters brought to life on stage by a team of actors. For the Sheffield-based collective Forced Entertainment, all of the above is something to avoid. They’ve spent over four decades questioning our understanding of theatre, and creating playful, improvisational performances that are anything but typical.

Following their major 40th anniversary celebrations in 2024, the company is returning for a UK tour this autumn including stops in Sheffield, London, Lancaster, and beyond, premiering two very different works – the surreal performance Cold Sweat, where performers lip-sync to AI-generated performances, and the homemade experience of Selected Works, where the stories of Shakespeare plays are retold with the help of ordinary household objects.

AI is something on many of our minds at the moment, and it’s become a core theme in Forced Entertainment’s recent work. Their 2024 production Signal to Noise, featured the familiar monotone of an AI text-to-speech voice as its soundtrack, with the on-stage performers lip-syncing along. A lot has changed in the world of AI in two years, and Cold Sweat is the next step in that journey.

Tim Etchells, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment explains; “In previous works, we viewed AI as a tool. But Cold Sweat feels like it’s set on the ground we are standing on. We are living in a world where we are increasingly surrounded by voices, images, and texts that aren’t human. The piece asks: what are we in that context?”

The production explores a scenario in which a party has just ended, and common sense seems to be breaking down. Three performers who regularly appear in Forced Entertainment’s shows – Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, and Terry O’Connor – lip-sync along to the unpredictable and often inhuman AI voice that dictates all of their actions.

True to Forced Entertainment’s style, it’s a blend of the human and the artificial, with the AI reading out a script written by Etchells: “I feed the software unpunctuated, nonsensical, or highly repetitive text to ‘confuse’ it. It disrupts its natural efficiency. It allows me to create poetic, ‘unsayable’ text that the AI voice then serves as a mask for.”

The overall effect is to capture an experience that has become very familiar to all of us – technology taking control of human behaviour, even when its actions don’t seem to make sense. Etchells compares the effect to the work of David Lynch, which explored often confusing feelings of alienation with a mix of humour and dread.

“I’m frankly quite frightened by AI,” Etchells admits, “but not because of what it does to the creative industry. I fear what it does to us as human, social, and political animals. Surrounded by content that isn’t coming from a human perspective, but from a farmed, recycled algorithmic one… at this moment of global crisis, we need human vectors—people with skin in the game. That’s why the project feels necessary.”

The company’s other touring work this autumn, on the other hand, celebrates the simple everyday world of objects. Selected Works: Tabletop Shakespeare, has been a project over 10 years in the making, in which Forced Entertainment aimed to tell the stories of all 36 Shakespeare plays, using ordinary objects from salt and pepper pots to jam jars, plastic jugs and sponges, as the actors, and a simple table as the stage.

Out of this full canon, Forced Entertainment have picked a number of plays as part of Selected Works for this regional UK tour, visiting venues around Yorkshire, with performances presented as double bills – audiences can expect to experience a tragedy and the comedy, right after each other.

“It’s about the magical transformation that occurs when the audience invests in these objects as characters,” Etchells says. “Whether it’s red and green objects for the Montagues and Capulets, or items scavenged from a shed to give Macbeth a brutal feel, it relies on that direct, lo-fi storytelling. You don’t need fancy period text. You need someone in the room, creating a world with what’s at hand.”

Shakespeare can often be difficult to access, with the original verse a barrier for many audiences. With Selected Works, Forced Entertainment aims to knock that barrier down. The performers use language to describe the events of the plays, condensing down epic narratives into fun, accessible, one hour-long performances. “It’s an intimate, playful celebration of what theatre can be using minimal resources,” Tim notes. “Audiences don’t need prior knowledge of Shakespeare to engage with it.”

Forced Entertainment have developed their own very unique way of working as a team, where every member contributes to the whole.

“We are a particular breed of theatre makers,” Etchells says. “We work in the studio; we make things in the rehearsal room. We are terrible at knowing much in advance. My role is to be on the outside, watching, while everyone else is in the middle of the joyous confusion. That gives me a different insight.”

“We tend to try a lot of different alternatives as we’re making a show. We say we’re eliminating possibilities from our inquiries! You do the work to the point where it becomes clear what the direction needs to be. It’s almost like you haven’t made a decision – the work has made it for you.”

It’s a philosophy that has served them well over four decades – and has allowed audiences around the world to truly feel a part of the performance on stage: “I’m interested in creating performance spaces where the audience has a lot of imaginative work to do. I don’t want to lecture. I don’t want to tell people what to think. I want to create a field of energy that is funny, unsettling and playful, where the audience negotiates the politics, the emotion, and the reality of what’s in front of them.”

Forced Entertainment, and Cold Sweat, will be part of Sheffield Theatres’ Open Works festival this October, which will celebrate new theatre and new voices from and around the city – fitting for a company which has been based in the city since its founding in 1984.

Etchells celebrates Forced Entertainment’s relationship with Sheffield Theatres, “It feels really good that a company like ours, based in the city, has a positive and forward-looking conversation with the major theatre in Sheffield. It’s also the understanding that the theatre ecology in the city is diverse and includes many different things. What we do is very different from what Sheffield Theaters do in their output, and that’s good – it shows that the city has a curiosity and hunger for the different approaches that we and other artists involved in the season take.”

Sheffield also has the unique status of being the only city to welcome both of Forced Entertainment’s new touring works, Cold Sweat and Selected Works, this autumn. Etchells notes, “I think the thing that motivates us often are the questions about what theatre and performance can be. What are the different ways in which you might stage an event for an audience?” 

“Cold Sweat is this big technological thing, and Selected Works is just one performer at a table – it’s very intimate. Whenever we have the chance to show two different sides or two different aspects of what we do, it’s always really enjoyable for us, and great for audiences.”

Cold Sweat plays at Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse 2 & 3 Oct and Selected Works plays at Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse 10-12 Nov. Tickets are available here.