Occasionally in my blogposts I have moved away, briefly, from just sampling tinned foods and attempting to write vaguely amusing things about them, to tell you about some artist or other who has either used or been inspired by such items in their work, or even television programmes that happen to feature canned goods. Not quite sure why I do it, but it makes a change, at least.
I have yet to have reason though to write about anything concerning tinned food and the theatre, one of my other great passions. Until now, that is.
Recently I discovered that the Sheffield-based theatre company
Forced Entertainment would, over the course of a week, be putting on their own take on the complete works of William Shakespeare at the Barbican Theatre, under the title
Table Top Shakespeare. In essence it is a staging of the thirty-six plays from the First Folio (no
Henry VIII or
The Two Noble Kinsmen, which is a shame as otherwise I could have called this blogpost 'The Tuna-ble Tinsmen and other stories'), abridged to just an hour each, and presented without scenery, costumes, or huge casts, but instead on a table top, with one actor telling the story using a range of everyday household items as the characters.
The Barbican website describes it thus: "a salt and pepper pot for the king and queen. A spoon stands in for a
servant and a candle for the Friar. Macbeth becomes a cheese grater,
Pericles a light bulb and Hamlet’s now a bottle of ink."
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| © Hugo Glendinning |
