Hidden j (Bad News, Nad People, Bad Debts)

 “Long ago and far away there was a country and all the people that lived there were a bunch of fucking cunts…”

Hidden J begins with a lone performer who takes a seat at the front of the stage, donning a sign that proclaims her a LIAR for the duration of the work.

At the centre of the performance is a no-hope drunk English bloke who is in the process of messing up a wedding speech. Around this hapless figure, Forced Entertainment present diverse fragments of apparently unrelated material—scenes of some unnamed East European war zone, a botched hospital operation, the narration of an angel and a devil, and accounts of a massacre in what could possibly be Africa.

In the project, the uneven and openly hostile onstage power relations of Club of No Regrets (1993) are pushed even further—we see a group of performers/protagonists who appear to disagree fundamentally about the story and the world which they are trying to describe. Created alongside the company’s lecture/performance A Decade of Forced Entertainment (1994), Hidden J is also an attempt to respond to the mood of England in the mid-‘90s.

© Forced Entertainment 1994. Theatre performance.

Credits 

Conceived and devised by the company

Performers: Robin Arthur, Cathy Naden, Terry O'Connor, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall

Direction:Tim Etchells
Text: Tim Etchells
Assistant Director: Nick Crowe
Design: Richard Lowdon
Lighting Design: Nigel Edwards
Soundtrack: John Avery