It opens with two flashlights, standing on a tabletop, nervously awaiting the arrival of a cheese grater. Or rather: the ghost of a grater, with a thirst for vengeance – and a slender glass-bottle son who may or may not get the job done.
This is Hamlet, as you’ve never seen it. Instead of a stage, a table. Instead of players, humble household and supermarket items: a canister of flea powder standing in for the murderous usurper King Claudius; a pepper grinder for Queen Gertrude. Instead of the usual three to four hours, just one. Instead of Shakespeare’s poetic prose, a single performer delivers a narrative re-enactment. “To be or not to be” – one of drama’s most vaunted soliloquies – boils down to: “Hamlet comes along and he’s thinking about death – again.”
This pared-back Hamlet is one of 36 tabletop versions of Shakespeare’s plays performed by UK theatre mavericks Forced Entertainment, who will bring the series to Australia for the first time this month in Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare. A full set will be staged across eight days at the Adelaide festival, and an abridged set over three days at Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island festival. (You can even watch them for free on their website.)
Table Top Shakespeare has proved immensely – if not universally – popular, touring Europe and the US to acclaim over the decade since it premiered. “Occasionally you get somebody who’s unhappy that we’ve stripped the Shakespearean language out of the pieces,” says Forced Entertainment’s artistic director, Tim Etchells. “But there’s plenty of productions of the full plays. It just wasn’t what we were interested in doing.”
Forced Entertainment, an ensemble of six that turned 40 last year, has built a reputation for experimental and often absurdist durational work, building marathon productions from improvisations rather than using existing texts. In the 24-hour performance Quizoola!, one performer improvises answers to an apparently never-ending stream of questions asked by another, while audience members are free to come and go. In the six-hour improvisation And on the Thousandth Night, eight performers jostle with each other to tell a story that never ends.
They were never going to do “straight Shakespeare”, says Etchells.
“There was a subversive impulse there – to take these high-culture texts that are so revered and to play them as this kind of lo-fi puppetry on the tabletop,” he adds. “And I think it also chimed with our interest in the way that spoken language conjures images, makes things happen.”
It’s true: under the spell of the performer’s narration – and careful hands – even a grubby, half-empty bottle of linseed oil seems haunted by some dreadful dilemma; over the course of each show’s duration (45 to 75 minutes) you find yourself inexorably absorbed into the drama.
Watching the plays reveals something about Shakespeare’s craft, too. “It’s like taking the car engine apart and putting all the pieces on the driveway; it makes you see the mechanism a little bit more clearly,” says Etchells.
“The comedies are really interesting because they often work on pairings – so on the tabletop, they’re very beautiful; they have this endless symmetry. But something like Cymbeline is a bit of a mess on the tabletop, because it’s an inelegant structure.”
Each of the performers, assigned six Shakespeare plays apiece, took different approaches to “casting” their productions: Cathy Naden used objects from her late mother’s house, while Richard Lowdon used items from his cellar – including a grimy jar, a tin of paint stripper and a crusty old faucet handle – to conjure a dank aesthetic for his Macbeth. Some choices are delightfully tongue in cheek: Iago is played by a pack of cigarettes; he will kill you.
All of the performances are unscripted, giving each the quality of a pal telling you the plot of their favourite film at the pub. Some performers are chatty; others adopt a more dramatic, campfire delivery.
It’s this “theatre in the everyday” that continues to excite Etchells a decade into the series. “This magical transformation of space and time is not the sole province of the big stage with the fancy lighting rig,” he says. “You can do it right here on the tabletop with a few everyday objects. It’s a human capacity for transforming and narrating.”
Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare runs 8-16 March as part of Adelaide festival, and 21-23 March as part of Ten Days on the Island, Tasmania.
