If All Else Fails @ Battersea Arts Centre

A Forced Entertainment production
Performed by Cathy Naden & Seke Chimutengwende
Co-produced by Cambridge Junction & Sheffield Theatres

Comical and tangled, If All Else Fails is an interrogatory dialogue of speech and movement, questions and answers. An absurd test that fails to find the answers.

Two performers engage in an absurd test that seems to shift and change as they work their way through it. Fragments of a language lesson. Questions from a personality quiz. Slogans from some future society.

The performers laugh, hesitate, ask for more time. As the clock ticks it’s not even certain if the subjects of the test are the audience, or the performers.

Drawing on the artists’ mutual interest in improvisation, and in setting up complex, comical and unstable performance situations, If All Else Fails brings together two powerful forces in the contemporary theatre scene to create a perplexing and original exploration of new territory.

‘Cruel, comical game of repetition and reversal from Forced Entertainment’ ★★★★ The Stage

‘Shockingly brilliant’ The Guardian

‘Theatre pioneers’ BBC Art News (UK)