Selected Works: Table Top Shakespeare at Shakespeare North Playhouse

We’re used to seeing Shakespeare’s plays staged with grandeur and reverence, but Selected Works: Table Top Shakespeare by Forced Entertainment strips all that away, replacing it with wit and imagination. Here, kings, lovers and tragic heroes are reimagined using everyday objects – pepper pots, bottles, bits of kitchen clutter and condiments – transforming Shakespeare’s most canonical works into something playful, strange and brilliantly human.

Arriving at Shakespeare North Playhouse this November, this stripped-back production sees two performers take on six Shakespeare plays across three evenings, creating an intimate world on a tabletop stage. From the political unrest of Coriolanus to the tangled desires of Twelfth Night, battles, betrayals and romances unfold in miniature, conjured through ordinary language that swaps iambic pentameter for something far more immediate and accessible.

It’s a format that could easily tip into gimmick, but in the hands of Forced Entertainment – long celebrated for their experimental, distinctly northern approach to performance – it becomes something quietly radical. This is a company that has built a reputation on breaking down theatrical convention, embracing liveness, and finding meaning in the everyday. Here, that ethos feels is applied to Shakespeare, whose stories, once stripped of their ornamentation, reveal themselves to be as direct and human as ever.

What emerges is not parody, nor simplification, but a kind of re-seeing. By reducing these sprawling, canonical works to their bare essentials, Table Top Shakespeare exposes each play’s emotional core – jealousy, power, love, confusion – and inject new meaning. The performances are also unexpectedly funny, leaning into the absurdity of watching epic drama played out with bits of kitchen clutter, without losing any of the emotional pull.

Who says Shakespeare needs to be weighed down by tradition and grandeur? Table Top Shakespeare is a reminder that theatre can be inventive, intimate and brilliantly low-fi. Sometimes all you need is a table, a story and a willingness to see things with fresh eyes.