Canterbury Tales
Just in case you didn’t pay any attention at school, The Canterbury Tales is a series of linked stories told by a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury Cathedral. This is what people used to do before mobile phones were invented. They talked to each other to avoid getting bored rather than tweeting they were bored. The characters are distinctive and presented by their occupations, so we have the likes of a knight, miller, cook, etc.
Presumably if the Tales were told today we would be on a pilgrimage to Argos for a half price telly in the end of summer sales. There would be a temp worker, one of those people that fix the self-service machine in Tescos when it starts shouting at you, and a council bod who’s on the sick after the latest restructuring. But I digress. Chaucer was writing his prose and rhyme in the 14th century when professions were more varied. The only calling centre was God.
24 tales are brought to life by a cast of 5 actors in under two hours. They are the Pantaloons, a young and vibrant theatre company whose blend of riotous energy and anarchic humour immediately absorbs the audience. Before the play starts we are warned some of the tales are “so blue they could be told by Smurfs” followed by twenty minutes of songs based upon the professions of audience members. The format is simple, we are told: “it doesn’t matter as long as it rhymes.” When one audience member offers that they are an engineer, our host sings “I had a job as an engineer….but I never got out of second gear.” It’s silly, harmless fun and a perfect ice breaker. Likewise a man at the front caught texting is immediately jumped on by the Wife of Bath who calls him the “saucy cyber man” and grabs his phone, taking lots of seflies of herself.
The MC is a young squire travelling with his father, The Knight. The actors have fun with the role being played by a woman pretending to play a boy who is annoyed at keeper having to play the part of a woman in the stories. The young squire desperately wants to tell a story, but always gets interrupted. We are in the realm of farce and the repetition works well.
The Tales are re-told through rap battles, opera, puppetry, music and story-telling, talking chickens, bawdy romps, all sprinkled with topical 21st century cultural references. Anyone dreading 2 hours of medieval English need not worry, the text has been translated and edited into modern parlance although the actors occasionally use medieval speech to remind us that these stories are over 600 years old. However, this is appropriate as Chaucer did the same thing when he wrote the stories in the common vernacular of his time - Old English - instead of French or Latin.
The Wife of Bath - one of the most popular and memorable characters from the Tales, oozes personality through her bawdy antics. We learn about the tale of a knight at the Court of King Arthur who goes on a quest to discover what women really want – “where's Mel Gibson when you need him?” The answer, by the way, is sovereignty over their husbands – women want to be in charge, sentiments endorsed by many of the audience.
Changes in attitudes towards sexual equality and 'feminine virtue' since the 14th Century are handled well, with The Clerk's Tale (where a young wife is tormented by her husband to test her loyalty) are given an ironic psychoanalytic twist in keeping with Chaucer's own ambiguous intentions and intrusive narration. Tales of bed-hopping bawdiness and hilarity suggest that real life and ideas of virtue in the 1300's were rather different, and to some extends more liberal, than those of today. Sex, tricks and rivalry are themes that run through the stories, with young wives hoodwinking older husbands and japes that famously include in The Miller's Tale the sassy Alisoun tricking an admirer into kissing her arse instead of her mouth, celebrated with infectious glee: '"Tee tee!" quoth she, and clapt the window to.' Isn’t this the kind of thing people are still doing today on Youtube Prank videos? The more things change, the more they stay the same…
Playing with the idea of tale-telling and the feeling that we are all part of the story, the final tale is improvised to include audience participation. Jonny, a Landscape Designer and cricket enthusiast (probably from Bread and Lard Island) was invited on to stage and the Pantaloons improvised a tale which included 'the cutest dragon ever' a small boy who volunteered his services to the delight of the actors and audience. For this reason, every outdoor theatre show is likely to end differently. We didn’t want this tale to end. Please come back!
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