Forced Entertainment Theatre Company (Great Britain)
In the framework of the experimental program of the Moscow Theatre Olympics in the Meyerhold Center held productions of the British company Forced Entertainment with two productions: 12 am: Awake & Looking Down and Quizoola! The first lasts seven hours, the second - about five. There are also 24-hour theatre marathons in the repertoire of the British company. In the annotation to the productions, their creators assert: "The most important part of these scenic works is the fatigue of the actors and the absurdity of their task." Working together since 1984, the group usually arranges performances not on theatre stages, but in basements, dressing rooms of gymnastic halls or in railway tunnels.
Quizoola! is kind of linguistic “second hand”. The performance consists of 2,000 questions, which, alternately changing, ask each other two actors in the clown makeup. "What is the name of the capital of Spain?", "What should be the depth of the tomb?", "Was there a war in the Persian Gulf?" etc.
The attraction, of course, is not that the last question, for example, makes a reference to the famous thesis of Baudrillard. And not even to make the spectator doubt the possibilities of the language to describe the world, despite the fact that the elementary questions look sometimes stupid, but sometimes unsolvable. The most entertaining in "Quizoola!" are the direct reactions of the actors-improvisers, who really do not bother to watch for hours. Sometimes it seems that their unpretentious, resentment or irritation are not fake. The questions and answers, found without a peep, are good themselves: "What separates Eastern and Western Europe?” - “The Iron Curtain.” - "What width is it?" - “Two inches!”. Exhausting themselves with a multi-hour performance, the participants of Forced Entertainment are condescending to the public and do not impose their experiments. "During the presentation, viewers can come, leave and come back at any time”, - the company's programs say.
Oleg Zintsov, Vedomosti