Out Of Order

On a bare stage under bright light, six hapless clowns do their best to get along and pass the time. An old music plays on loop – the wrong kind, but no one seems to mind. The clowns rehearse old gags and get entangled in new ones. They fight and chase in eruptions of uneasy mayhem, then cool off a little, settle and wait for the whole thing to kick off again.

Carefully unbalanced between funny and not funny, Out Of Order is the ruins of a show in the ruins of a world. Violence and posturing, high jinx and clown on clown comical capers give way to bickering, exhaustion, hunger, melancholy and silence. The clock ticks. The music swells to repeated climax. And everything comes to nothing.

• For more than thirty years, the theatre pioneers in Forced Entertainment have been expanding the horizons of theatre. Their productions often explore the intersection of other genres: dance, performance and music, but also cabaret, vaudeville and stand-up, or the theatricality of a press conference or quiz show. Just like Real Magic, which was shown in 2017 during Kaaitheater’s 40th birthday celebrations, their latest production Out Of Order strips back to the fundamentals of performativity, this time disposing of even language itself to present their first show without words.

Our era of buffoonish leadership is brilliantly skewered in Forced Entertainment’s mimed maelstrom of aggression. - The Guardian