Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare | Adelaide Festival

Shakespeare’s 36 plays in eight days, as they’ve never been imagined before! Salt and pepper shakers for the king and queen. A ruler for the prince. A spoon for the servant. Lighter fluid for the innkeeper. Hamlet is a bottle of vinegar. One by one, over eight days, every Shakespeare play is condensed into a series of 36 intimate and lovingly made miniatures, played out on a one metre table-top using a collection of un-extraordinary, everyday objects. Seminal experimental theatre group, Forced Entertainment have long had an obsession with conjuring extraordinary scenes, images and narratives using language alone. Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare explores the dynamic force of narrative in a simple and idiosyncratic summary of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and late plays, creating worlds as vivid as they are strange. Complete Works is the first time they’ve tackled the Shakespearean legacy. The result is a kind of levelling of the plays – a gently comic re-casting of objects from the kitchen cupboard and supermarket shelves – as well as a celebration of their power as stories, and the act of storytelling and theatre itself.