Festival week keeps the ball rolling for drama at the Crucible

The reason was that outside the new function room of the Crucible building where the launch was held, a group of local actors were taking part in a play reading.

The reading was a part of Forge, a festival of new work being held in and around the venue over the next week.

During April, Steel City becomes Snooker City and this festival, as well as giving a platform to some of the country's leading theatre artists, re-establishes the Crucible as a building where drama of a non-sporting nature happens.

Tomorrow, Forge sees the multi-award winning theatre collective The Paper Birds perform a new work in progress and for the rest of the week, theatre artists will present new and sometimes challenging work, alongside a programme of workshops and talks.

Some will be in a finished state and some, like the Paper Birds' Others are still in the germination stage.

The theatres' artistic director, Daniel Evans, will lead a workshop on speaking Shakespeare's verse on Monday, award-winning Paines Plough will talk about running a theatre company on Tuesday and associate director Richard Wilson, best known as TV's Victor Meldrew, will run a class on improvisation on Saturday.

One of the highlights of the festival, which comes as the city submits its bid to become the UK's first City of Culture in 2013, is Void Story.

A new work by Sheffield's own Forced Entertainment, it is a typically bold piece of work from a collective which has been at the forefront of experimental British theatre for more than 25 years, but which is not as recognised on home turf as it is abroad.

The Financial Times carried an article which claimed: "The best group of stage actors in Britain are Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O'Connor. They headlined this year's Adelaide Festival. Their latest show, Bloody Mess, has been glowingly received in a host of European cities. And later this month, Lift, the London International Festival of Theatre, will present a season celebrating 20 years of their work, Indoor Fireworks. But who are

they?... Forced Entertainment, a British theatre company that has been creating experimental work in a range of media to increasingly extravagant acclaim around the world: New York, Beirut, Berlin, Norway –almost everywhere, that is, except Britain."

Despite this, Forced Entertainment, whose work was celebrated in an American festival a number of years ago, remains resolutely tied to Sheffield, and home audiences will have the opportunity to see the company next week.

Robin Arthur, one of the core six members of Forced Entertainment, which has been making work in Sheffield since 1984, lives in Berlin but keeps a flat in Sheffield.

He says the South Yorkshire city is key to the identity of the work created by the company.

"Anyone who sees our work recognises something very Sheffield in it. It's there in the humour and in our latest piece it's there in a very real sense because some of the footage features the city," says Arthur, who along with six other graduates from Exeter University formed Forced Entertainment in 1984 on graduation.

He says the reason Forced Entertainment receives greater recognition abroad is because "the climate is a lot more open in mainland Europe to the kind of work we produce".

"The landscape of British theatre is changing, but we still lag behind our European counterparts, primarily because of the lack of venues that are able to host this kind of work.

"When we started, the Leadmill was absolutely instrumental in our development because it was a place where we were able to present and create our work," says Arthur.

"There used to be a network of arts centres across the country where we could take our work, but those have been eroded. It's great that the Crucible complex has a studio and is able to stage a festival like Forge, to give other companies an opportunity to develop their work and develop their audiences."

As well as offering the chance to see Forced Entertainment in its home city, Forged will include a performance by another Sheffield experimental theatre company, Third Angel, on Saturday, May 29.

Arthur says: "We couldn't fill the Crucible every night of the year, but having a festival like this gives people a chance to see some really interesting work."

n For full details of Forge, log on to www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk