Festival review: Table Top Shakespeare — Coriolanus, King John, Much Ado About Nothing
This complete rendering of Shakespeare, without actors and speeches, but instead storytellers using a cast of performers from the kitchen cupboard, not only intrigues us but shows us how an audience works.
Led by Tim Etchells, for 41 years the wryly-named Forced Entertainment company from Sheffield UK have made it their business to question and re-frame the business of theatre. Where other companies strive to replicate the world with intricate naturalistic décor and fourth wall acting, they have ruptured and altered audience perception. As one English commentator has observed, they confound conventions and explode expectations.
So when Forced Entertainment take on the task of presenting all 36 plays by William Shakespeare, we can be fairly sure it won’t be with crowns and swords and beards, Elizabethan costumes, and a skull for Yorick.
Over eight days they are presenting summaries, synopses, descriptions and re-tellings of every play, each running between 45 to 75 minutes. But, unlike the Fringe productions that gabble through the entire canon in 65 minutes, or take a section of a single play for enhanced attention, Forced Entertainment are forcing us (in the nicest possible way) to think about how theatre itself works on our perceptions – especially the plays of the most revered playwright in the English language.
In a sectioned-off portion of the Space Theatre is small stage area with a wooden trestle table, a chair and two plastic tubs . At each side are two five-tiered racks crammed with hundreds of familiar domestic objects. It looks like someone has ransacked a street full of food pantries, laundry cupboards and medicine chests.
Behind all this is a large, rich red stage curtain, the familiar epitome of stage illusion, to be opened and closed in its peekaboo way. Except, here, its only purpose is to be out of place and remind us of what is not happening.
The first play is Coriolanus — not first in the printed canon, in fact it is the 31st. No chronologies or themed symmetries here; random order like shuffled cards. The performer, Jerry Killick, is selecting items from the shelves and carefully placing them on a small bench beside the table. It becomes apparent, that, like any stage director, he is selecting his cast, finding what best suits the role assigned.
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Table Top Shakespeare’s pantry-like stage set-up. Photo: Hugo Glendinning / Supplied
Sitting at the table, Killick begins his commentary. It is low-key, informal, vernacular, droll, but always matter-of-fact. He is clearly absorbed by the story he is telling and intent on sharing the key components. We are effortlessly drawn in.
It begins with two generals, Titus Lartius and Cominius, and he illustrates this by placing what look like two Duracell batteries (the long-life ones) on to the bare table. They face each other as if talking. A delegation of plebeians arrive to complain that the population of Rome is being starved of wheat. They are represented by tiny wood screws, plastic boxes, and tatty cardboard packets.
Others enter the narrative. The devious Menenius is a rather kitsch silver candle holder, a messenger is a small pocket torch. Already we are looking for representations, metaphors or satiric meanings. When the central figure, Caius Marcus Coriolanus arrives, he is a large, battered pewter trophy cup with handles like jug ears. He towers over his subjects, or rather his objects – and he is the military champion of Rome. So now, is this some kind of a symbol ?
His domineering, Freudian nightmare mother, Volumnia is a metal plated coffee percolator who is placed thumpingly into the scene plotted out on the table like war games, or a YouTube how-to-fix-it segment. Virgilia, Coriolanus’ reticent wife, is a smaller, less imposing coffee plunger.
Killick’s splendidly judged narration marshals all the threads of the plot with careful precision. A play we may know is becoming lucid in precis, but our eyes are always on the table. This has become a sort of daft puppetry, except it isn’t simplistic, and it is certainly not trivial. The ambivalent portrait of Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s great Roman tragedies and the more we watch, the more we become invested .
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Will Coriolanus join forces with the Volscians leader, Aufidius (a large bottle of Ultra laundry liquid) and demolish Rome in revenge for his humiliating exile, or will he be put to death as a turncoat? The crisis in the play has become real in the oddest way. As, for instance, in the slow march when the slain, now-horizontal trophy cup is solemnly carried on the shoulders of two aerosol containers (one of which is perhaps shaving cream).
This illusion in plain sight captures the paradoxes of theatre —not just our willingness to suspend disbelief, but our determination to do so. None of us would have preferred Killick to stand alone and tell the story; it is the blocking, the chess moves, and the interaction of seemingly banal objects, that brings an imagined story into perceptible truth.
Shakespeare said it himself: “O for a muse of fire, that would ascend / the brightest heaven of invention.” The table is the wooden O in the strangest Globe. And Forced Entertainment brilliantly persuade us that the isle is not only full of noises but meanings of our own making.
This project is marvellous in its wit and paradoxical theatricality. Far from being a waggish send-up, or a whimsy, the tragedy of Coriolanus can be told with a pewter cup and two coffee pots, as if they were actors at the RSC.
Also mention goes to Cathy Naden for her engrossing rendition of King John (performed by a potato masher) a play whose tedious intricacies defy synopsis. The bottle with the red stopper is the cardinal to the life, and the death of Arthur (a small well-meaning computer cable package?) over the parapet is inexplicably memorable.
Interestingly, the comedies are more difficult to deliver. In Rich Lowden’s Much Ado About Nothing, with Claudio as a small bottle of babycham, Beatrice, a pretty canister, and Benedick, a tinny of Bundaberg, the joke casting enhances the absurdity.
But in the play’s more problematic moments, the villainous Don John is a suitably vinegary balsamic bottle; and the Judge, a dispenser of Saxa salt. It is very apt, when the cans go incognito to the masked ball, they are simply turned upside down.
Don’t miss this unforced entertainment, and try and see more than one play — so that you can go beyond the initial novelty to, perhaps, unexpected imagining.
Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare continues in the Space Theatre until March 16
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview