‘Nothing will come of nothing,” says King Lear, but Forced Entertainment know he was wrong. Absence is at the heart of Dirty Work (The Late Shift), a new version of the company’s 1998 show that presents a 75-minute catalogue of deaths, disasters and failures delivered in deadpan style by Cathy Naden and Robin Arthur. Almost 20 years after it was created, it feels both the same and different. We are now living in an era where tragic events and personal grief have become a sort of daily entertainment, played out on 24-hour news and social media. We see what once could only be imagined.
But as Dirty Work proves, the imagination is a powerful tool. For an experimental company, Forced Entertainment are gloriously in love with the conventions of theatre, its tawdry glamour and conjuring acts. Dirty Work demands the audience’s complicity as it details the trivial and the profound, personal losses and great catastrophes side by side. A child drops an ice-cream; a nuclear bomb explodes. A woman goes to the supermarket; millions die in battle. This is disaster as show business, an endless spectacle until the final blackout of death.
The stage becomes a space where life and death coexist. A place where we the audience begin as spectators demanding entertainment and gradually become witnesses. Terry O’Connor plays mood music on a gramophone as Naden and Arthur make us imagine a vampire who is unable to bear the thought of eternity and walks into brilliant sunshine; an intricate shotgun suicide; the mud of the Somme. An extended description of a decomposing body becomes unbearable, raising ethical issues around what we choose to look at, and what we really see.
The show asks a lot of the audience. We must bring our imaginations to bear or it could try the patience. There are some wry jokes, but this is deadly serious stuff, questioning the increasingly porous boundaries between reality and fantasy and reminding us that because we will all die, a day will come when every one of us in the theatre will be absent, too.
• At Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 1 July. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
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