Forced Entertainment’s Table Top Shakespeare Now Streaming

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To celebrate 40 years of tearing up the rulebook, Forced Entertainment want to share a landmark project with online audiences. From today, anyone can stream Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare online for free, to be watched, enjoyed and shared at forcedentertainment.com/complete-works. 

Presented live in cities around the world since 2016 and then online during the lockdowns of 2020-2021, Complete Works explores Shakespeare’s 36 Comedies, Tragedies, Histories and late plays. What follows is simple and idiosyncratic, absurd and strangely compelling as, through a kind of lo-fi, home-made puppetry, the stories of the plays come to life in vivid miniature.

Director, Tim Etchells said: “We’re happy that as a first step in this Birthday year we’re sharing this fabulous resource and archive of the Tabletop Shakespeare performances. It’s an unusual project, even by our standards, taking online audiences in the UK and around the world on a playful and strangely magical dive into Shakespeare’s plays by way of intimate retellings using domestic objects.”

Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare was the first time the company had approached dramatic literature and the Shakespearean legacy and the project has served as both a compelling introduction to the texts and a contemporary reinvention of them. The result is a kind of levelling of the plays – a gently comic re-casting of them via objects from the kitchen cabinet and grocery store shelves – as well as a celebration of their power as stories, and the act of storytelling and theatre itself.

In the group’s groundbreaking project, six performers create condensed versions of all of the Shakespeare plays, comically and intimately retelling them, using a collection of everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the one metre stage of an ordinary table top.

The free streaming of Complete Works is the first in a series of performances and events marking Forced Entertainment’s 40th year – more information can be found at forcedentertainment.com.

It’s an extraordinary record: six artists sustaining a unique partnership and creating work together for over 40 years. From its beginnings in Sheffield in the 1980s, through four decades of work in venues and festivals across the world, the multi-award-winning Forced Entertainment has earned a reputation as a unique UK contemporary performance company reinventing theatre on the international stage in simple and complicated ways.

FE @ 40 is an opportunity to reflect on that astonishing journey. In this 40th birthday year, Forced Entertainment plan to explore and (re)discover not only the company’s history but also its future. It’s going to be a packed year.