Tim Etchells and Tony Buck: Go On Like This – Southbank Centre, London

Writer: Tim Etchells

Percussion: Tony Buck

As part of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of avant-garde theatre company Forced Entertainment, its artistic director, Tim Etchells, performs a new, improvised series of performance poems accompanied by legendary jazz percussionist Tony Buck.

Anybody who’s seen other Forced Entertainment work – especially Signal to Noise, the company’s new work that received its premiere next door in the Queen Elizabeth Hall this week – will recognise the use of fragmented, repeated language, a couple of sentences spread out over an extended period as phrases recur and build.

However, where Signal to Noise’s use of recorded voices and lip-syncing exposed weaknesses in this approach, Etchells’s live performance emphasises its strengths. Just as with jazz improv, Etchells will take a couple of bars’ worth of words, repeat them, change the emphasis, and raise his voice where once he lowered it. Simple sentences morph and change as different sections are focused upon, and others fade into the background.

Pairing this technique with a jazz drummer helps emphasise the value of this performance technique. Buck uses what seems like a standard drum kit with techniques that produce distortions and dissonances, especially in those passages where Etchells’s words seem to slip further from reality as we know it.

The repetition and escalation help to remove the sense of linear progression that most spoken word performances rely upon. Some of Etchells’s visions start small – a man on the roof of a house – and then zoom both inwards and outwards as the fragments of sentence shift and reveal more of the work as a whole. So we begin to experience glimpses of some form of ecological disaster with cars in the water and trees on fire before pulling out even further to reveal an alien discussing how they have never visited Earth, only experiencing it through pictures.

With each 15-minute work, one can quite imagine that a linear reading of a poem would make a point but would draw a solid, definite line from A to B as it did so. Etchells’s work feels more like a thumb pulled through drawn charcoal, smudging it and bringing out new shapes as it does so.

It will not be to everyone’s taste; at times, one yearns for a variation in shape, size and length. Indeed, as the performance hits the hour mark, several audience members leave – only for Etchells to start a new piece with, “I think I’m losing you / You’re going in and out.” It’s part self-awareness but far more an introduction to a piece about troubles in communication. Buck’s accompaniment is ethereal, producing live soundscapes that are not dissimilar to what the BBC Radiophonic Workshop created, with lots of tape editing, in the 1960s. It helps propel Etchells’s words to sound like one-half of a short-wave radio call to distant spaces.

And that’s what works best about Go On Like This. It reminds us that while the voice is a musical instrument, the words we use can be instruments in themselves, too. By using language in the way jazz musicians use their own instruments, Etchells encourages us to reconsider the place and importance we put on words.

Reviewed on 12 October 2024

Forced Entertainment’s 40th anniversary season continues at The Place withShown & Toldfrom Thursday 31 October – Saturday 2 November; and at Battersea Arts Centre withL’Additionfrom Tuesday 5 November – Saturday 16 November, andIf All Else Failsfrom Tuesday 19 November – Saturday 23 November.