Reviving their 1998 performance of Dirty Work for the present-day, once again, experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment detonate theatrical convention and explore the bewildering worlds that performance can create. Based in Sheffield, the company of six artists banded together in 1984. Born from their shared frustration with British theatre in the eighties, Forced Entertainment continue to challenge contemporary audiences with their signature dynamic – a playfulness that has earned them international acclaim, and a reputation as one of Britain’s leading companies in theatre.

Armed with a vocabularic arsenal, the group storm the Battersea Arts Centre and expose a place in which real life experiences are presented as spectacle. In a competitive and collaborative act of description, two performers sweep the audience along a celebratory current as they honour the power of language and its ability to generate experiences.

Hand-dyed plum drapes are ruched and sewn together in a proscenium arched frame. Designed by Richard Lowdon, this Victoriana cloak swathed two chairs in the fore, and a third behind a desk upstage right. Upon it, there sat a record player soaked in white light from a single bulb, a cousin of those that ran across the front of the stage.

Cathy Naden wore a halter-neck dress to match the backdrop, and Robin Arthur dazzled in a glossy turquoise shirt. The colours clash as they jostle for the attention of their audience, radiant against Terry O’Connor’s black velvet number. O’Connor sits at the record player at the back of the stage, flitting between two tracks and sublime silences. Both a witness to and complicit in the action, her presence adds both security and menace. Mute, she observes Naden and Arthur as one-by-one, they begin to conjure fantastical histories and invoke imagined futures.

Naden is magnetic. With a furrowed brow and hands folded neatly in her lap, comical past events mutate into grotesque pictures of sickness and death.  Arthur compliments her charming performance, and the two clamour within their virtual playhouse, battling knowledge and creativity. Their stories take place within the anatomy of the theatre, and spectacularised headlines are summoned from the outside world to create a poignant narration on the global scale of theatricality, and its destructive power as real life events are exaggerated via social media.

The audience present themselves within the dialogue, and are handed a meta-theatrical branch by the performers. Indeed, their methods of theatricality and anti-theatricality established a fascinating relationship between the two parties, and the ensemble used this system well. When O’Conner commands reticence from her record player, the absence of sound heightens the presence of the spectator. Throats are cleared and chairs creak before the music is played once again, allowing this intense awareness to dissolve yet deepen at the same time.

At times, Dirty Work (The Late Shift) is in danger of becoming too present. This hazard however, was expertly avoided due to the company’s skillful negotiation between proximity and distance. Forced Entertainment danced bravely with current topics, and mischievously champion the economy of storytelling.

Dirty Work (The Late Shift) played at the Battersea Arts Centre until July 1.

Photo: Tim Etchells