Bloody Mess
Riverside Studios, London

Dolan Cummings

This is a play about the things that get in the way, and as such it isn’t really about anything. Such a brief would present a tough challenge for a narrative-minded playwright, but it lends itself perfectly to Forced Entertainment’s style of total theatre.

Bloody Mess features clowns, loud music, a gorilla, gratuitous nudity, lots of smoke, and all kinds of other distractions. But distractions from what? Occasional moments of lucidity – an attempt to tell a story, a prolonged dramatic gesture – are quickly lost amid the chaos, or openly shouted down, so that they themselves seem like distractions, dead ends for a piece that resolutely refuses to go anywhere anyway.

The programme suggest Bloody Mess is reminiscent of late-night channel-surfing. It ought to add that someone else has the remote control. This being theatre, however, the effect is bewildering rather than infuriating. In the absence of anything else, all we can do as spectators is sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Much of the time, we are left with our own thoughts, which are only intermittently intruded upon by events on the stage. What must it feel like to walk barefoot on popcorn?

This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to Bloody Mess beyond what it says on the tin, but it is the material, rather than the content, that is worth thinking about. This is theatre of, rather than about, the world. And ‘the things that get in the way’ are very much part of the world, not least in the arts. The busy-ness of the piece reflects not only the frenetic and hyperactive nature of late-night TV and other pop culture, but equally the desperation of theatre and the other ‘serious’ arts.

The need to get an audience, and not just any audience but the right demographic; the tyranny of relevance to myriad issues and agendas; most of all perhaps the desire to be edgy, to challenge taboos and break new ground. Where do these demands come from? Is it the audience, theatres, funders, or artists themselves? Bloody Mess offers no answer, but it illustrates perfectly the breathless quality of contemporary culture, with its desperate desire to please. As Philip Larkin might have put it: make them laugh, make them cry, bring on the dancing gorilla.

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