One of Adelaide Festival’s most fascinating theatrical offerings for 2025 comes from a group of six artists out of Sheffield, UK.

A lone performer positions themselves at a table, household objects arranged before them. Salt and pepper shakers form a king and queen. A ruler is animated as a prince. A spoon for the servant! Lighter fluid for an innkeeper. Hamlet... a bottle of vinegar.

Thus, one by one, over eight days, each of Shakespeare’s 36 plays are condensed into a series of intimate and lovingly made miniatures, played out on a table-top using a collection of un-extraordinary, everyday objects.

Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare is a blazingly inventive tackling of the Shakespearean legacy. And 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.

Forced Entertainment comprising Tim Etchells (Artistic Director), Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon (Designer), Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor have been collaborating to make original theatre and performances together since 1984. Their long obsession with conjuring extraordinary scenes, images and narratives using language alone led them to explores the dynamic force of Shakespearean narrative in a simple yet idiosyncratic way. In this wonderful series of condensed works, they create worlds as vivid as they are strange while making The Bard’s classic tales accessible to even the most theatre averse among us!

More information from the 2025 Adelaide Festival edition of WeekendPlus: