Sweaty, sad and stupidly funny, Forced Entertainment’s new show weaponises the clown’s classic toolkit. With outraged mime, honking horns and impotent balloons, Out of Order is a reflection on the messy world we live in, where what we lack in meaningful dialogue, we make up for in unfiltered aggression.
In matching tartan suits and white facepaint, six unsmiling performers grind themselves through a series of silent meetings, each ending in one person leaping over the table to clutch at the throat of another. The others try to hold them back, chucking chairs when arms won’t reach. They claw and grapple, clambering over bodies as if they don’t know how flesh can bruise. The performers aren’t young; you feel how each fight strains them, their painted faces drooping with sweat. Games of follow-the-leader end up spinning in circles. Violent spats end with no consequence but exhaustion, the fights nothing more than weary ritual.
The sister piece to the bum-numbing Real Magic, in which a single scene was repeated ad nauseam, Out of Order can easily serve as a metaphor for our era of buffoonish, brutish leadership, uncooperative and unhelpful in unending negotiations. But kick it backwards or forwards a decade or two and the show loses none of its potency – just keep booting until you find another group of suits sitting round a table failing to compromise.
Where it feels truly current is in its criticism of communication; the way we blindly follow and drown each other out. Out of Order may test our patience and push past the point of laughter, but by pinballing between childish hysteria and tumbleweed brutality, it mirrors our own absurdity; an uncommunicative society led by a bunch of clowns.
• At the Southbank Centre, London, until 14 October. Then at Home, Manchester, 13-15 November, and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Brighton, 19 November.
