Forced Entertainment

Information from their site: https://www.forcedentertainment.com/projects/exquisite-pain/#

Forced Entertainment is an experimental theatre company based in Sheffield, England, founded by Tim

Etchells in 1984.Forced Entertainment originally focused on making and touring theatre performances
before expanding to long durational performance, live art, video and digital media.
Exquisite pain is a show created by the theater company Forced Entertainment in 2005.
Based on the book by the renowned French conceptual artist Sophie Calle,
Exquisite pain marks the first time that forced entertainment have worked from a 'text'.
In this simple and intimate performance a man and a woman tell the story of an end of an affair along
with other ordinary and not so ordinary stories of pain and heartbreak. The woman repeatedly recounts
the story of an affair while the man tells stories from many different people; each story is accompanied
by an iconic image related to the story.

CREDITS
Conceived and devised by the company
Performers: two performers drawn from: Robin Arthur, Jerry Killick, Richard Lowdon, Claire
Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor
Direction: Tim Etchells
Text: Sophie Calle
Design: Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design Nigel Edwards
Exquisite Pain is a Forced Entertainment production from a text by Sophie Calle
Co-produced by Theater der Welt Stuttgart, BIT Teatergarasjen Bergen, The National Museum of Art,
Design and Architecture Oslo, Kaaitheater Brussels, La Filature – Scène Nationale Mulhouse
and Tanzquartier Wien Vienna

ADAPTATION:
• “hands off approach to material”, original text on the scene, no textual adaptation
• From the text on stage, words meant to be read, uttered
• Additions to the text: Stage, lights, actors’ voices, audience, images on the screens

Interviews from the two actors

Terry O'Conor:
“I think because Exquisite pain is based on somebody else's texts one of the interesting things is that
it's forced us to take a more hands off approach to material. Thus, the position that's left when you're
doing that is to be a true and honest sort of witness to other people's stories and other people's
testimonies. We used to joke in the early days of performing it that there wasn't really a very good joke
in the text until page 7 and then you had to wait a long time before that came along, but in fact as
touring the shows continued, sometimes people laugh right at the beginning and sometimes they didn't
really laugh at all; but you get the feeling that something else is happening which isn't so much about
entertaining or pointing out the meaning of the text is more about just doing the text just laying it out
for an audience to kind of make their own way through. It's like a kind of proposal for the
imagination .You're allowed in the piece to drift in and out of it to think about what's being said and to
think about your own stories your own experiences.”
Richard Lowdon:
“We were doing a post-show discussion in Manchester after it performance of exquisite pain which is
basically a sort of 2-hour catalog of loss and misery. And during the discussion I was trying to hand
around the one copy of the book that we had by Sophie Calle, on which the performance was based and
it's a very beautiful little black book with a red ribbon that you mark the page with; as it was being
handed around, this man, who I guess must have been his late 60s, early 70s, with very gray hair said
‘’it's really like a prayer book isn't it’’.It never really sort of occurred to me before. He also said in a
funny way, that it feels like a kind of prayer and I think he was trying to talk about the fact that there
are so many different stories here and that when you're performing, what you're doing in a way is just
holding them up so that people can think about them and sort of contemplate them... this beautiful
thing about performance being a kind of meditative space that makes you think back on your own life
and maybe think about memory and what is the truth and how one deals with things”

Excerpt from the devised text, taken from the recording of the performance
“His name was John. I was 27 he was 47; we were living together it was real passion, pure passion.
That morning, when I woke up and went to the bathroom there was a letter on the basin a few
complicated words, I don't remember what they were exactly, but they meant we had to break up. I have
no idea this would happen. I went downstairs I fled, I left everything I totally blanked out. I was in
analysis at the time and I crossed the Luxembourg gardens to go to my session I asked the analyst to
lend me a book so that I could leave with something in my hands to fill that void. He took from his
bookcase and old volume banned in red Morocco leather with engravings; like a sleepwalker I was
drew from the world for months, I suffered night and day. I didn't cry, but tears were constantly
screaming for my eyes and the wash basin obsessed me; the brutality of the white ,the letter on the
wash basin... perhaps that's why for the last 12 years I've had an apartment with no bathroom; no
basin.”

Journal:
What do I see:
Two actors in two wooden separate tables reading from two separate books. They each
have two small tv screens behind them, stage right and stage left. The screen over the
woman’s head(stage left) lights up and shows the same image every time she reads from
Sophie Calle’s book. The screen above the man’s head (stage right), lights up and shows
images or colors that are crucial to the story he reads from.(ex. The color green/a basin).
People listens carefully. There are unanimous laughs in the presence of bittersweet
humor about those real stories.
How do I feel:
Like I am in a reading of many people’s journals
What do I remember:
My sad stories that also have the colors described in some of the stage stories.
What do I take:
The memory of a quiet theater without music or actors performing roles,
the description of the same story with alterations, caused by a gradually fainting
memory,
the connection between image-memory and narration as simple but effective theatrical
tools