Offering audiences an inventive, irreverent and highly accessible way into Shakespeare, internationally acclaimed UK theatre company, Forced Entertainment, will bring its acclaimed Table Top Shakespeare to the Sydney Opera House for the first time this September.
Winner of the Ibsen Award and celebrated as one of Britain’s leading experimental theatre companies, Forced Entertainment has spent four decades challenging theatrical conventions.
Led by Artistic Director Tim Etchells, the company now turns its attention to Shakespeare, reducing the Bard’s sprawling canon to a tabletop, a collection of everyday household objects and the imaginations of six performers. A vase becomes a prince, a jar becomes Juliet, a Dettol bottle plays her nurse, and salt and pepper shakers rule an entire kingdom.
Narrated live and entirely from memory, without a fixed script, each performance distils Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies and histories to their essential characters, plots, twists and dramatic turns. The result is Shakespeare stripped of much of the ceremony and intimidation that can surround his work.
Rather than wrestling with Elizabethan language or confronting the perceived weight of the classics, audiences are invited to discover the stories through wit, imagination and a generous dose of theatrical playfulness.
That makes Table Top Shakespeare particularly appealing to anyone whose experience of Shakespeare ended with an English class at school, as well as those who have always found his language daunting. For more seasoned theatre-goers, it offers an entirely fresh perspective on plays that have been performed and interpreted countless times.
Table Top Shakespeare: Selected Works is presented as double bills across the season – two plays per evening over one week, covering comedies, tragedies and histories including Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Each night brings a different transformation as the performers conjure an entire Shakespearean world from objects more commonly found around the home. The simplicity of the approach leaves the storytelling exposed, allowing the drama, romance, comedy and sometimes spectacular twists of Shakespeare’s plays to take centre stage.
Suitable for audiences aged 14 and over, the production promises Shakespeare with the poetry intact but the reverence considerably reduced. As King Lear says nothing will come of nothing.
Table Top Shakespeare: Selected Works
Studio – Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point, Sydney
Season: 22 – 27 September 2026
Information and Bookings: www.sydneyoperahouse.com
Image: Forced Entertainment presents Table Top Shakespeare – photo by Hugo Glendinning