The next time you open your kitchen cabinet, pause for a moment. That bottle of ketchup; that tin of tomatoes; that pepper mill — could they have star potential? They certainly could in the hands of Tim Etchells. With his company Forced Entertainment, he plans to stage all of Shakespeare’s plays using a humble table-top and a cast of household objects. If you’ve always suspected your corkscrew to be a bit of a diva — well, you may be right.
Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare will join a wealth of performances, talks and exhibitions celebrating 2016 as the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. And it is surely a mark of just how resilient, flexible and remarkable the Bard’s work remains that among the actors gearing up to play Hamlet this year will be a bottle of balsamic vinegar.
But wait a minute. There are some searching soliloquies in Hamlet that are pretty important. Will a bottle of vinegar really be up to the job? Etchells explains that audiences won’t have to endure the likes of pepper mills grinding through famous speeches: each play is condensed, narrated by the human performer in charge of the objects, with just a few quotes from the texts.