It's Friday night in a south-east London supermarket. A couple pushing a trolley are asking a man wearing the supermarket uniform about the location of a product. Then the worker is approached by a young woman who strikes up a conversation; it's clear that there is a spark between them. The couple with the trolley look bemused, then they smile. Those of us watching smile, too. Another woman dressed as a cheerleader is looking for alfalfa, and a shy librarian called Jane is dreaming of her own Mr Rochester. The chore of the food shop has got a lot more interesting.
Supermarket Shakespeare is the brainchild of Teatro Vivo, a bright young company that is spending a second season disrupting the spectacle of consumerism with their own spectacle – in this instance, springing from the ideas and emotions in Shakespeare's Sonnet 23. The free experience works like this: there are six characters, and during an hour you get to follow up to three of them around the supermarket in 20-minute segments, during which their stories collide and overlap.
There isn't a lot of Shakespeare, but there is potential love in the cat-food aisle, tears by the sun cream and a brilliant sense of little dramas played out – some witnessed, some unseen – among the hustle and bustle of daily life.
The best bits are when real life crashes into the dramas: the look of amazement and pleasure on shoppers' faces as they accidently stumble across scenes is a delight. It's not Shakespeare, but it's a neat idea, cleverly executed, that puts theatre into real life and real life into theatre.
