Their Latest Risk: Household Objects Playing Shakespeare

There are no small parts. There are some very small actors. In “Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare,” which starts Tuesday at NYU Skirball, the blazingly inventive English company Forced Entertainment will whiz through 36 Shakespeare plays. (Sorry, “Henry VIII.”) Each play is a solo show, abetted by armloads of household objects: cups, cans, kitchen twine, wood glue, gin. Juliet is a jar of marmalade. Hamlet is a bottle of vinegar. (Genius.)

Six Exeter University drama students founded Forced Entertainment 34 years ago, and “Complete Works” is just one more appendage to its wriggly, wondrous, maddening body of work. To see a Forced Entertainment show is to ask what theater is. And why theater is. And how on earth am I still awake.

A pioneer of durational performance, Forced Entertainment has created performances that last all night, all day and still never get where they’re going. (Failure is an enduring, intended theme.) The curtain raiser for “Complete Works” is “And on the Thousandth Night ... " a storytelling marathon Saturday that starts at midnight and finishes at 6 a.m., without any of the stories ever reaching completion. (NYU Skirball will provide cocktails and beer. Also — urgently — coffee.)

“Both pieces take a simple idea and try to push it as far as we can go,” said Tim Etchells, the company’s artistic director. For this troupe, the only collective that has ever won the International Ibsen Award (other winners include Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine), that is very, very far.

Speaking by telephone from Sheffield, England, Etchells, who appears in “On the Thousandth Night ...,” discussed inanimate objects, epic performances and why most Forced Entertainment shows — the Skirball ones, too — are built to fail. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

A: If you’re based in the U.K., people are always saying, “Would you ever do Shakespeare?” For more than 30 years, our answer was, “No, I don’t think so.” What I like about this project is that we’re sort of doing them all, and then, in another way, not quite. We really focus on the plot architecture. Mostly, it’s very easygoing language, very everyday.

A: Some of his later plays — the plots are extremely rickety and chaotic. Something like “Cymbeline,” it’s a bit of a mess. On the tabletop, that’s quite fun. There’s something about narrating it that allows it to breathe in a different way.

A: I’ve always been interested in the way that, as an audience member, you’re projecting, you’re doing the work of the imagining. And here, because the actors on the tabletop are inanimate objects, they’re perfect screens. You actually end up watching the last breath of Cordelia in “King Lear” and thinking: Oh, now she’s died! That glass vial that was Cordelia for the 40 minutes — there’s no life in that thing any more. Theatrically, it works in quite a weird, magical, transformative kind of way, as well as being ridiculous.

A: We’re always trying to reinvent that relationship. We get bored of always railing at people or poking them. I think there is a challenge — a huge challenge — in this Shakespeare piece, but it’s also built on this quite genial and quite open, quite everyday attempt to say, “Let’s be in this small space together and try to see if we can make this particular thing happen.”

A: The possibility of it all falling to pieces seems really important in terms of what a live performance is. Both the Shakespeare and the long durational piece, they both have very clear ways in which they are always failing or might always fail. The vulnerability of that’s interesting to me. It’s human and it’s got a kind of frailty to it. In “And on the Thousandth Night ...,” we’re improvising stories, and a lot of the fun in that piece is just watching people get trapped, improvising things that they clearly have no possibility to successfully complete.

A: We arrived slowly at the form of improvised story and the dynamic of interruption. Performers stop each other whenever they choose. It’s a very playful piece. It can be quite delirious and unruly at times. There’s a competitive, contradictory edge to it. Funny, but quite tough.

A: Durational work breaks down some of the defenses that you have as a performer. The first hour is the hardest and the least interesting, because you’re fully in control. In the later hours, your ability to stage-manage yourself gets weaker, your ability to hold it together starts to erode. You find a different energy. It’s actually harder to stop than it is to carry on.

A: It’s tough. Students come in to see us, thinking that it might be some sort of utopian, idyllic situation. It’s not. It’s a meeting of six very different people with very different takes on what we’re doing. It’s not a utopian space at all. It’s hard work. What makes it sustainable is that we all believe that together we have made something better and stronger and more interesting than we would do individually.