Shakespeare Tin Love

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."

© Hugo Glendinning

You've probably guessed by now that the reason I'm telling you about this is that some of the characters are, in these versions, 'played' by tins of food, which I discovered from reading an article about the project a little while ago. However, neither the article, nor the company's website, revealed which items had been 'cast' in which plays, so there was no way of knowing which ones would feature tins.

I decided therefore to email Forced Entertainment, explaining my reasons for wishing to know the cast lists due to my interest in tinned foods. Amazingly, they didn't just think I was a complete nutter (well, possibly they did, but at least they didn't just delete my email) and I had a very nice reply from Jim the Production Manager, who said that although he didn't know exactly which items were being used for which specific parts, he did have a list of everything being used in each play, so was able to give me a run-down of which ones featured tins:

As You Like It...with Tomatoes (© Hugo Glendinning)

Julius Caesar – tin of coconut milk 

Timon of Athens – tin of peas, tin of brussels sprouts, tin of green beans, tin of peas and sweetcorn

As You Like It – tin of tomatoes, tin of baked beans  

The Two Gentleman of Verona – tin of sprouts, tin of potted meat (not spam) 

Pericles – tin of beans

Othello – tin of coconut milk 

Merry Wives of Windsor – tin of beans, tin of tomatoes

Comedy of Errors – an unlabelled tin

Troilus and Cressida – tin of pilchards, tin of coconut milk, tin of 'Tip-Top', 

Twelfth Night – tin of beans

An intriguing list, if ever there was one. I started to wonder which parts these tins had been cast as, and what made the company choose those ones in particular. Beans seem to feature the most - is that because they are such a staple of the kitchen cupboard, so they get typecast as the "everyman" type character - the Martin Freeman of the tinned food world? Or does their reputation for causing wind make them suitable for more comic roles - Touchstone in As You Like It, Falstaff in The Merry Wives, Feste the Clown in Twelfth Night?

Pilchards and Cressida (© Hugo Glendinning)

Coconut milk appears in three of the plays - what qualities do the directors think it shares with characters from Julius Caesar, Othello and Troilus and Cressida?  Has anyone ever seen the last of these to be able to say?

Likewise I am in the dark when it comes to Timon of Athens and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but I can only assume that they both contain an utterly repulsive character, given that they both feature a tin of brussels sprouts in Forced Entertainment's versions.

Anyway, I didn't get to see any of the productions to find out in the end - they were all taking place at the Barbican last week, which ended up being a bit of a busy one for me. Sorry not to have let you know sooner, or you could have gone yourself. But don't worry - we haven't completely missed out on seeing some tinned talent onstage. When preparing to write this blogpost, I thought I ought to have a bit of a search to see if the worlds of tinned food and theatre have ever met before. So I Googled "theatre tinned foods" - and blow me down, if the first article that came up wasn't about a play which is just about to start touring the UK, called Tinned Goods. What are the chances of that?!

Staged by a company called Tea and Tenacity, the play is in fact set in the 80s during the miners' strike. Their blurb about it reveals the following:

"Sue and Rachel have not spoken since the miners walked out three months earlier. Can political principle ever be worth more than a lifelong friendship?

Divided from former friends by their choice to strike, the women of a tight-knit community battle to save their way of life. Fault lines are exposed, forgotten wrongs resurface and loyalties are pushed to the limit as the miners’ wives move from the background to centre stage…"

Hmm...not much about tins there. So I emailed Tea and Tenacity, again explaining my interest, and asking to what the title referred and whether the play would in fact feature tinned goods. They were a little coy with regards to the first question, but did at least give a firm answer to the second:

"I hope when you see the show, you will have an opinion on why it is called 'Tinned Goods'. We like our audiences to come up with ideas themselves rather than us tell them what to think, but yes, there are tinned goods within the production."

So, there we go. I guess the tinned goods are going to turn out to be a metaphor, or something. Perhaps I will find out, if I make it along to see it.

My Googling also revealed that there is a play by Edward Bond called The Tin Can People, part of his War Plays trilogy, which together portray "a brutal world struggling in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust". In this play, the second of the series, "a community of survivors are living on tinned food, years after the nuclear explosion. When a stranger appears, he is welcomed into the group, but suspicions mount when one of the other survivors dies. Convinced that the newcomer is contaminated, the group resolve to destroy this new threat to their existence."

Sounds pretty bleak from that description alone, doesn't it?

But this is the writer whose first play Saved was banned in the 60s for its infamous baby-stoning scene, and Lear, his modern-day take on Shakespeare's play, actually shows the character having his eyes gouged out onstage (rather than
leaving it to our imagination between scenes, as in the original).

So it wouldn't surprise me if The Tin Can People was really, really bleak. Edward Bond has probably only given them tins of brussels sprouts to survive on.