It mightn’t be every Shakespeare lover’s cup of tea (or salt shaker, or Tabasco sauce bottle), but UK company Forced Entertainment’s retellings of the stories of Shakespeare’s plays are engrossing experiments.

If you’ve ever watched a child enact a drama of their own making with toys and Lego blocks, you’ll be at least somewhat familiar with the form.

Cathy Naden: Table Top Shakespeare. Photo © Cassandra Hannagan

Stripping Shakespeare’s language out completely, a solo performer, sitting at a table, uses a curated selection of domestic bottom-drawer and pantry items – all sorts of bottles, jars, pens and knick-knacks – to stand in for the characters while narrating, from memory, the sequence of events. Who’s who; where they came from, why they’re here and where they’re going, etc., etc.

If it sounds like a joke, it isn’t: Forced Entertainment’s mission is an entirely (though not unsmilingly) serious one: to open up canonical texts to an examination that sidesteps analysis of language – a barrier to so many – and spotlight the human behaviours and decisions fundamental to each play.

The Sheffield-based company has all of the Bard’s plays in its repertoire. On this occasion, performer Cathy Naden unpacked the story of Measure for Measure, the notorious “problem play” infamous for a trick devised to spare a novice nun’s virtue from a moral hypocrite.

That work is paired with colleague Claire Marshall’s take on the no-less-curly The Taming of the Shrew, in which the sparky, unruly Katherina is represented by an ornamental china flower and Petruchio by a novelty, beer-glass-shaped mustard jar.

As each story unfolds, we’re exposed to some gentle commentary on Shakespeare’s magpie approach to plotting – his slapdash endings and self-plagiarism are noted. The impression given is that Forced Entertainment respects the Bard as a fellow traveller rather than as a genius figure to be venerated. These are living stories to be worked on and played with rather than museum items set behind glass.

Cathy Naden: Table Top Shakespeare. Photo © Cassandra Hannagan

It’s no grand spectacle but there’s much to enjoy and learn. The tabletop arrangements pay scrupulous attention to the blocking of groups and to social class (made apparent in the choice of object stand-ins for the characters). Marshall’s Taming of the Shrew includes the strange “induction” – routinely committed in modern-day productions – in which a nobleman plays an elaborate prank on a drunken beggar.

The performances are low-key, with Naden and Marshall working at near-conversational level. It’s no small feat to speak for 45 minutes straight and recall all the twists and turns of plot and character, and they do so with impressive ease, though it’s not being done with impressing the audience in mind.

Forced Entertainment presents Table Top Shakespeare in the Studio, Sydney Opera House until 27 September.