Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 237306950
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, Germany then touring to 3 US venues (Chicago, Los Angeles and New York) and 17 venues across the European continent and streaming worldwide
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- July
- Year of first performance
- 2015
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare is a series of 36 performances, each lasting 45-60 minutes, in which six performers present versions of Shakespeare’s plays, comically and intimately retelling them using everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the bare stage of an ordinary tabletop. Conceived by Tim Etchells, Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, and performed by the company, the work has been presented to audiences of over 40,000 in numerous theatre settings from Los Angeles to Amsterdam since 2015. In autumn 2020, in response to the global pandemic, a nine-week livestream ‘At home’ production was broadcast from the homes of the 6 performers, receiving 37,416 unique views.
The project extends Etchell's longstanding research in virtual or described performance, examining the possibilities of conjuring extraordinary scenes, images and stories using language alone, animated by spectator imagination. Complete Works explores the dynamic force of narrative and framed improvisation in relation to the epic and the everyday in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The work concurrently combines condensation and expansion, reducing duration by two-thirds, rendering poetic language as pragmatic vernacular and plot as tabletop schematic. Each episode of the live theatre-presented project takes its place in an overarching structure, with the individual presentations staged over a 9-day period, with a total of 36 hours of performance.
The work was co-produced by Berliner Festspiele – Foreign Affairs Festival Berlin and Theaterfestival Basel. Touring of the Complete Works project in 2016 was supported by the British Council. The work has been discussed in Time Out, Shakespeare magazine and Exeunt magazine. Outreach programmes reached 537 young people in Sheffield through schools and Aspergers Children and Carers Together. Teachers’ workshops have reached participants in Ghana, Holland, India, Kuwait, UK and the USA.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -