About the work
“That Night Follows Day” is a theatre piece by the British artist and writer Tim Etchells, director of the performance group Forced Entertainment, written for an ensemble of 16 children aged 8 to 14 who perform for an adult audience. Etchells developed the text in workshops with the first young performers and directed it for the Flemish company Victoria (now CAMPO) from Ghent; it premiered in Brussels in May 2007 as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. The German translation is by Astrid Sommer.
Plot
There is no plot in the usual sense: the children face the audience as a chorus and address it directly. In a long, deliberately contradictory list they confront the adults with what they are taught, told, forbidden and promised – from table manners and good advice to white lies and claims about how the world works. As the children repeat, reverse and hand these sentences back, it becomes audible how strongly upbringing, school and care shape young people’s lives – and how language both forms and limits children and adults alike.
Cultural significance
The original Dutch-language production toured internationally, including the Festival d’Automne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007 and the SPILL Festival in London in 2009. Further versions followed, among them a German radio version for Deutschlandradio Kultur (2008), an English-language stage version by the Canadian company Theatre Replacement (2009) and a London production by Forced Entertainment at the Southbank Centre (2018); since 2011 the text has also been explored worldwide in rehearsed readings with young people. Theatre scholarship discusses the piece as an example of children appearing in contemporary theatre as speakers in their own right before adults.