In their latest offering, Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, Forced Entertainment continue to explore their fascination with storytelling, presented here in its purest form. It’s no mean feat: 36 plays over six days, shared between six performers. Forced Entertainment are no strangers to this sort of durational experiment – those familiar with their work will note their improvised project Quizoola, regularly performed over 6 or 24 hours, demanding the performers to answer and ask a constant barrage of questions. However, there is something altogether more wholesome, and certainly more accessible about their latest musings.
Included as part of the Shakespeare weekender at the Barbican, the Pit theatre was simply set with two packed pantry shelves, neatly framing a simple wooden table centre-stage. Immediate intrigue is provoked in an audience of all ages, as condiments, egg cups and other knick-knacks are carefully positioned by the table, ready for the ensuing play.
I caught four of the 36 plays – Julius Caesar (Robin Arthur), Merry Wives of Windsor (Terry O’Connor), Troilus and Cressida (Jerry Killick), and Antony and Cleopatra (Cathy Naden).
The premise is simple and the same basic structure is used for every play, but each offers something quite unique. Each narrator starts out by plotting the course of their play with the help of a specific group of household items, each one representing a character. The table top becomes the stage, sugar-shakers and marmite pots the players. It isn’t Shakespeare as we know it: no iambic pentameter or soliloquising, but a bare-bones oration of character, motive and plot.
The stories unfold, and the performers demonstrate a virtuosity for storytelling. We hang on every word, even if we’re familiar with the story. The stories are enriched in the retelling as the playful performers each bring their own persona into the mix. It is a familiar trait of FE’s work, allowing the natural traits of the actor to inform their performances.
It is an object theatre of sorts, but it is important to establish here that we are not witnessing object manipulation in the usual sense of this term. There is very little personifying of the bottles and tins on the table, and no illusion that these objects are something meta- it is more like watching a graphic score unfold, or battle plans being discussed. The objects are signifiers to the characters’ presence, and occasionally their movement, but rarely do they actually move. Having said this, the object assignment to each character has clear motives. Caesar, for example, is played by a large bottle of olive oil, considerably bigger and more luxurious than any other character in the play. In contrast, servants and maids are played by the more menial objects from the pantry – tiny salt-shakers, bobbins and eggcups. Cleopatra is later embodied by a delicate, ornate china cup, far more elegant than any object thus far, and by far the most fragile (fickle). Assimilating the objects in this way aids in the delivery of humour, context and subtext.
Throughout the performances there are moments of pure joy: O’Connor’s treatment of the bumbling Falstaff (a rotund bottle of sherry) is a perfect example. She is intrigued by her own storytelling, excited, occasionally falling over her own words, mirroring the farce at play. Robin Arthur by contrast delivers some of the most poignant and delicately crafter friezes: his gaze and piercing focus upon the characters is emotionally transfixing. It is reminiscent of his precise craftsmanship in Forced Entertainment’s earlier work, The Notebook.
Complete Works may lack the usual romp and vigour of FE’s more experimental large-scale works, but it still bares one trademark of Etchells’ meticulous direction: keep nought that is unnecessary. The clarity and simplicity is the triumph of this project, a demonstration of theatrical storytelling at its best.