Weep for a little red pocket torch and a pot of Rose’s Lime Marmalade
Presented by: Forced Entertainment (U.K.) Co-produced by Berliner Festspiele – Foreign Affairs Festival, Berlin and Theaterfestival – Basel.Reviewed: 9 March, 2025
Terry O’Connor walks to the plain wooden chair set behind a large neutral-coloured table. She sits, surveys her audience, and begins: “Romeo and Juliet. It starts in Verona on a hot summer’s day.” From then on, for an hour, we are enmeshed in the storyteller’s magical net. This is Shakespeare boiled down to its elegant bones; “a Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare* for grown-ups”, as my consort observed. Flanked by two five-tier shelves crammed with bottles, pots, glasses, pepper grinders, pocket torches, matches and jars, O’Connor gently launches into this true-love tragedy, aided by two sets of bottles, glasses and pots – one each side of her chair.
Sheffield-based Forced Entertainment, a group of six theatre-makers from Sheffield (U.K.), brings all 36 of Shakespeare’s plays to this year’s Festival. Spread over eight performance days, they are performed in order; each show takes between 45 minutes and one-and-a-quarter hours to present. We get the idea that not all Shakespearian sub-plots will be given equal weight. Hence that “Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare” comment (see above).
The story of “Romeo and Juliet” has been mined (at varying depths) by many of our cultural artforms – theatre, television, film, ballet, opera, musicals, poems. There’s even a Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigar. What O’Connor gives us, in an hour of clear, direct and warmly communicated narrative, relates the major threads of the Shakespeare story without bowdlerisation, tacky modernities or jarring rewriting of the original text. Her voice is remarkably well-suited to this medium, and she reads her audience astutely, pacing the cadences of the tale to our collective cognition. It feels as if no-one is left out of the circle of her story.
The language is pared-back and clear. It never attracts attention to itself but constantly serves the task of the narrative. As each person, from lowly servant to lord, is named, a different item is selected to represent them, and placed on the table. The classic feud between the Montagu and Capulet families, which is at the heart of this tragedy, means that it’s handy for us to see who’s who in the feud. Capulets are green; Montagus are red. Lord Capulet is a green-labelled silicone sealant package. Lady Capulet is a bottle of green dish-washing liquid. Juliet, their beautiful daughter, is, of course, a jar of Rose’s Lime Marmalade. Gentle laughter accompanied the elderly Capulet nurse’s arrival on the table as a battered bottle of green-labelled Dettol. Lord Montague is a large red heavy-duty torch; his ill-fated wife looks like a bottle of red-wine vinegar. Romeo is, of course, a small red hand-held torch. You get the idea.
This unique storytelling mode reflects the power of puppetry. We worry about the little silver hand-torch, the silvery drink bottle and the chromium cocktail shaker. The craft underpinning O’Connor’s gently relentless story engages us as we endow domestic objects with the needs, fears and hopes of the characters she brings to life. This plain-languaged version ensures that we never hear all those old quotes that we are so used to in the original Shakespearian language. Shorn of the familiar text, we are faced with the grace of the story arc, the awful inevitability of its plot, and the joy of a shared tale.
- “Tales from Shakespeare”, by Charles and Mary Lamb. 1807.
Reviewed by Pat H. Wilson
Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning
Venue: Space Theatre, Festival Centre
Season: 8 – 16 March, 2025
Duration: Between 45 minutes and 1 hour 15 minutes. This performance: 1 hour
Tickets: $29:00
Book: https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/table-top-shakespeare/
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