Festival review: Table Top Shakespeare – The Taming of the Shrew
Forced Entertainment brings Shakespeare to the kitchen table, brilliantly retelling the Bard’s plays using pantry items and adding fresh spice to the great stories of the canon.
‘Kiss me, Kate,’ the jar of anchovies demands of the white rose knick-knack. This is Shakespeare stripped down to bare essentials, the play recounted as a story using small household objects on a trestle table. The whole idea is oddly hilarious, clever and leaves audiences with a solid grasp of Shakespeare’s knotted plots, characters in disguise and his genius for mixing comedy with moments of profound tragedy.
Subversive UK theatre ensemble, Forced Entertainment, has built a reputation for experimental and absurdist work and they are bringing their immensely popular ‘lo-fi puppetry’ narrations of Shakespeare’s canon to Australia for the first time.
The premise is hilariously simple. An actor narrates the story of a Shakespearean play in under an hour. The stage is a trestle table and a single chair. The characters are various household items you’d find in your pantry or a garage. The audience sits close to the action, the intimate space is flanked by two large pantry shelves that hold the cast of every other play in the ensemble’s repertoire. The lights dim and an actor sits down at the table. She reaches for a bottle of Tabasco sauce, a cigarette lighter, and her story begins.
In the original five-act play, the action opens in Warwickshire, England. The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play, and considering this convoluted plot is being recounted in forty-five minutes, condensing the action to the Padua scenes by slicing away the framing narrative would be entirely understandable. No. The performance strictly adheres to Shakespeare’s text, scene by scene.
As such, we see a mischievous lord and his retinue (played by a bottle of Tabasco and stock cubes) tricking drunk tinker Christopher Sly (a cigarette lighter) into believing he is a wealthy landowner. Just as in the original, these characters in the framing narrative watch the central action unfold in the form of a play, the lighter and Tabasco bottle moved to the far corner of the table to observe the problematic courtship of Petruchio and Katharina in Padua, acted out by the anchovies and white rose.
It sounds like a version of Shakespeare we’d be desperate for in high school, the bones of the plot and themes laid bare after all the poetry and Elizabethan idiom is boiled away. And for purists who believe it is the beauty of Shakespeare’s language that elevates him to the realm of genius, this format might leave a strange taste in the mouth. But this form of storytelling, with its modern paraphrasing and quirky visual cues, cleverly pares away any ambiguity and confusion that can dilute our grasp of the action when struggling to make sense of the original language.
In the modern era, The Taming of the Shrew is one of the most problematic of Shakespeare’s canon. Performed by Claire Marshall, this retelling beautifully captured the comedic trappings surrounding the tragic heart of this play. The bizarre tricks and ludicrous disguises of the opening acts inspired much laughter in all the same places as the original text. Yet Petruchio’s domination and cruelty in which he ‘tamed’ his wife as he would a wild hawk (with sleeplessness and hunger) and Katharina’s desperation as she struggled to find a strategy for survival in the face of her husband’s cruelty, these deeply traumatic scenes lost none of their power in Marshall’s retelling.
We are given the paraphrasing of the famous lines in which we see Katharina’s defeat: ‘If you say the moon is the sun and the sun the moon, then I agree with you’, yet none of the great heft of this moment is lost with this modern narration. Marshall’s delivery is a masterclass in tone and timing. There is not a skerrick of judgment in her delivery. The lines are spoken, yet it is the silences which carry the most weight. Marshall speaks softly as she recounts this harrowing tale, moving her pieces across the table, her pauses giving the audience the space to feel the words land and the weight of their meaning.
The casting of the condiments and knick-knacks is delightful. Cruel and domineering, Petruchio is ably represented by the jar of anchovies, a small serving being well and truly enough. Katharina’s white rose ornament is beautiful, a little spiky and out of place, with no one knowing quite how it found it itself in the pantry among all these condiments. While the objects are just mute stand-ins given voice and agency by the actor/storyteller, the audience somehow invests them with extra meaning. The colourful can of Mackerel powder representing Bianca (Katharina’s sister) is oddly attractive, while also a somewhat bland additive. Disguises are signified (and simplified) by turning objects on their head, and a jar of anchovies declaring that it fears no woman’s tongue is casting perfection.
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This is truly wonderful, innovative theatre that brings the wildly original stories of Shakespeare to audiences with any elitist trappings stripped away.
Last night’s bare bones Taming of the Shrew was just one of thirty-six tabletop versions of the Bard’s plays performed by brilliant UK theatre ensemble Forced Entertainment. During the Adelaide Festival, they will bring their full set to the table as part of Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare. Choose a favourite or seize the chance to experience one of the canon you’ve not yet seen. Whichever you prefer, just don’t miss out.
Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare continues in the Space Theatre until March 16
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview