The potential for wackiness is high. As
part of the international “Shakespeare 400” celebrations, renowned
avant-garde company Forced Entertainment are spending a week presenting
the actually not
quite
complete works of the Bard (only 36 of his plays) in versions cut down
to around 45-60 minutes each, on a tabletop, with a cast of everyday
items. So, for instance, in the three history plays I saw, Richard II
and most of his court were portrayed by various drinks bottles, but
with the transition to
Henry IV
parts 1 and 2, presented by a different member of the company,
Bolingbroke (later King Henry) was recast from a bottle of Scotch to a
container of wood glue; his son prince Hal (later Henry V) was a
wrought-iron candlestick and Falstaff an appropriately rotund brandy
bottle. Supporting roles were played by articles such as small vases,
coffee mugs, salt cellars and, in the case of some poor conscripted
troops, old apple cores.
But the wacky begins and ends there. Each solo storyteller does not
present the play but recounts its narrative, using the various doodads
to focus our attention. They’re not even Cliff Notes versions of the
plays, as each piece contains only two or three brief remarks of
exegesis. And at this point I must admit that I have always found
Forced Ent to be very much a “more in theory than in practice” company.
They can come out with screeds about “proximity and overview” or “the
alchemical transposition of language to images”, but I always seem to
end up feeling that they’ve taken one idea that was thinner than they
thought and flogged it for far longer than it could sustain. In this
case, I was also booked to see their
Henry
V but simply didn’t feel that another hour of this would impart
anything additional to me, so I passed up the chance of seeing the
battle of Agincourt with, possibly, the boxes of matches I spotted on
the shelves of stuff which bookend the stage. All right, so it shows us
how we use our imaginations, but that’s hardly original in theatre or
any other art form, is it?
Written for the Financial
Times.