At the temporary building, Thinc installed a U-shaped tank, which the company's president, Tom Hennes, based on the shape of a blackjack table.
A glossy, sea-blue promotional book, about the size and shape of a coffee-table art book, boasts that the ship will have the amenities of the world's most sybaritic resorts -- a full-size tennis court, two swimming pools, a jogging track, putting greens, driving ranges, boutiques, a health spa, a nightclub, a casino and a theater offering movies and classical concerts by visiting artists.
Using an interactive screen the size and shape of a Ping-Pong table, you can play God and direct the future evolution of Mars.
This one took on the shape of an informal round table discussion with leaders and visionaries of the industry; in them was the grounded wealth of experience unparalleled outside of that room.
He points out that The Shape of the Table followed a period of absence from theatre, in which he had been "writing a lot of television stuff that, as often happens in TV, didn't get made.
In 1989, I felt there was enough in common between the uprisings in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria to create a representative fictionalised narrative of the fall of eastern-European communism; the play, The Shape of the Table, would demonstrate a common process but also dramatise the experience of heady opportunity (on one side) and loss (on the other).
The Iron Curtain Trilogy is typical of Edgar's work in that each play is driven by an image encapsulated in the title: the etiquette of a negotiating room in The Shape of the Table; various meanings of "speaking in tongues" in Pentecost; and a classic case study from psychological game theory for The Prisoner's Dilemma.
The Shape of the Table (1990), dramatising negotiations over the constitution of a post-communist democracy, was a response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, commissioned, written and staged with unusual speed by the National to be premiered on the first anniversary of the desegregation of Berlin.
In his most recent play, If Only, performed at Chichester and broadcast on Radio 4, the entire coalition government occurs while theatregoers are having their pees and ice-creams; in both The Shape of the Table and The Prisoner's Dilemma, the entrance of a play-changing character happens just before the midway lights come up, and this is a calculated tactic.
