If All Else Fails review

We are good people. You are bad people. We are bad people. You are good people. Agree or disagree?

Developing director Tim Etchells’ interest in pared-back, quotidian language and its repetition, Forced Entertainment’s latest two-hander sees performers Cathy Naden and Seke Chimutengwende bat simple phrases like these back and forth in a game of endless imitation, contradiction and improvisation. The pattern goes: a phrase is established, then either its content (good/bad) or subject (we, the performers/you, the audience) is varied. Phrases recede and are reintroduced – most significantly: “This is part of the test/Is this part of the test?”

Some sound like threats, others are tentative questions. At times, they seem to be speaking from their position as performers for an audience (“You have made a mistake”… by coming to this show?, "Our work is hard, your work is easy”), and sometimes there is an unseen third entity at play, an amorphous ‘they’, to whose mysterious rules we are all perhaps subjected. The delivery is often rapid-fire, words flying out in our direction like tennis balls from a machine, a discombobulating interrogation; elsewhere, there is hesitancy and silence. The performers rarely move from their positions at the front of the stage, and there is a sense that they are trapped. They ask for more time, it’s going too fast. Doubt arises as to their place in this absurd task – who is conducting the test, and who is being tested?

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