Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare (Pit, Barbican)

"Table top" sounds like a feast. This is more like a famine: solo narrators, props of condiments, oils and face-creams. Performance studies students’ favourite company, Forced Entertainment, offer a skid through all the bard’s work – though chickening out of Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII – from now to Sunday.

In three hours, I saw badly edited prose digests of Romeo and Juliet and King John – the baron knights, represented by a bunch of plastic bottle toiletries, are more suggestive of barren nights – and a ludicrous reduction of an absolute masterpiece, As You Like It.

I don’t think Forced Ent are intent on cutting Shakespeare down to size. The idea, presumably, is to liberate the plays in our collective imagination – as urged by the Chorus at the top of Henry V – and have a little fun on the side. But once you’ve clocked that Romeo’s a red hand torch, King John’s a potato masher and Queen Constance a jam jar of wooden pegs, so what? The imagery doesn’t amount to a hill of beans – even though Touchstone’s a tin of baked ones.

A wised-up colleague was telling me in the interval about a French production of Ubu Roi in which a solo performer conveyed the barbarity of the potty-mouthed paranoiac by laying about him lavishly into a stage-full of innocent vegetables. Carrots and turnips were diced, and decimated, in the stew of carnage. This is dynamic imagery, and it expands the meaning of the play.

Here, an actor sits at a bare, scrubbed kitchen table, dully reciting the narrative – and at least you are reminded that most of Shakespeare’s unoriginal stories are quite good – while reaching meekly for a sauce bottle, silver hip flask (that’ll be the Bastard, Faulconbridge) or Fairy Liquid (I think that’s Lady Capulet, but it should have been Mercutio). Two large trolleys of condiments, creams and bottles stand inertly on either side.

The whole point of Shakespeare’s plays is their poetry and symphonic richness and, while a genuinely radical cut-up approach, like that of the late Charles Marowitz, can sometimes yield fresh wonders in silhouette, or relief (for this relief, much thanks), Forced Ent’s laid back, deliberately anodyne, treatment backfires badly; or rather, it back-splutters badly.

Robin Arthur resorts to more frantic animation in As You, because he has no choice, really. But who is Rosalind, what is she, how much do we fall in love with her – zilch. There’s a wan gag spun about not reciting the second most famous speech in the canon, but by then the audience is sunk into a form of uncaring rapture.

The best delivery is that of Terry O’Connor on Romeo and Juliet; she manages a sense of loving wonder at the tale she unravels, and I’ll give her another go tonight with Richard II, followed by the two parts of Henry IV, the greatest epic in our language. Pass the salt, please. I’ll probably need a very large pinch of it.

Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare runs at the Barbican until 6 March.