It’s far from surprising to see Shakespeare re-imaginings cropping up in an international arts festival, but Forced Entertainment’s tabletop series stands firmly on its own two (or should we say four) feet. In the Sheffield-based company’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, each of the Bard’s plays are cast using household items, the stage an everyday dining table seemingly lifted from someone’s kitchen. Split between six performers, the plays are summarised rather than recreated, relayed in a colloquial, non-scripted fashion in the vein of a folktale or bedtime story. 

‘If you were telling a story to a kid at the breakfast table or showing somebody how a particular car accident went down, you might use the things on the table to be the vehicles and the people involved. That's how we're doing Shakespeare. It's a sort of very crude, simple puppetry, if you like,’ explains creative director Tim Etchells, who has watched this project successfully travel around the world for nearly a decade. 

Despite the success of this work, Forced Productions began in 1984 as a subversive theatre company totally uninterested in traditional plays. ‘I would say this project was the first and only time that we've picked up a piece of what you'd call dramatic literature,’ Etchells admits. ‘As a theatre maker in the UK, you're always asked “are you ever going to attempt Shakespeare?”. For 35 years the answer was “not really”. Suddenly we thought maybe there was an interesting way for us to do all of them and at the same time not do them, which is sort of what this project does.’

Whether you identify as a Bardolator or a complete Shakespeare novice, Etchells and team believe there is value in watching some of the world’s most famous plays being deconstructed and laid out; like taking out the engine of a car and seeing how all of its constituent parts fit together. ‘They're really good ways of getting a grasp of the whole shape of a play,’ he elaborates. ‘In a two or three hour-long full production of something, there can be a case of not quite being able to see the wood for the trees. On the tabletop, it's like seeing a circuit diagram of how something's working electrically, you understand it in a different way than if you see the whole object.’ 

Of course, there’s also an element of absurdity involved in making a room full of adults stare at salt-and-pepper shakers and inject them with pathos. ‘On the one hand, it's a joke, and people will laugh because the ghost of Hamlet's father is a cheese grater,’ Etchells giggles. ‘But then you end up staring at the cheese grater like it's a disturbing spectre from another dimension.’ The way to make us believe, he explains, lies in how the performer casts and handles each object. 

‘We're not making the objects walk across the table like they're alive, but there’s something about how you pay attention to the objects, how you touch them, how you move them from one place to another. If you do that right, then the audience goes with you and ends up looking at the objects like they matter. The jam jar filled with dirty paint brushes is only the murderer if you treat it in that way.’ 

During their week-long run at Adelaide Festival, the company will take residency inside Adelaide Festival Centre’s Space Theatre, a room with a capacity of around 300 people. The staging requires an intimate set-up where the tabletop is visible and close (Etchells compares the blocking to a YouTube tutorial where someone is explaining how to fix a vacuum cleaner or use an item of make-up). ‘You should feel, in a way, that somebody's sat with you in the pub telling you a story,’ he says, ‘so it's got that kind of very direct, casual feeling to it. That’s how people really do tumble into the stories and get caught up in them.’

Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 8–16 March, times vary.