Preview Canterbury Tales
Chaucer's unsavoury tales get the Northern Broadside treatment at the West Yorkshire Playhouse
Preview: Canterbury Tales
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The older elements within our society might like to depict some or all of the following as primarily recent innovations: filth, fart jokes, knob-gags, pay-as-you-pray religion, extra-marital affairs, binge-drinking, theft, vanity, elastic interpretations of uniform regulations, serial brides and poor hygiene standards on the part of professional chefs.
Nope. If the older elements within our society wanted their viewpoint to appear credible, they should have had the good sense to burn all the copies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century collection of stories-in-verse The Canterbury Tales, or at least petition the government to remove it from the GCSE and A-Level syllabi. We, on the other hand, should be thankful that such an act of barbarism has not been perpetrated, not only because some of us have had the luck to encounter that most winning of works during our studies, but also because a new production of Mike Poulton’s celebrated adaptation visits the West Yorkshire Playhouse this fortnight.
The Canterbury Tales lends itself to dramatisation readily, in large part because it indulges our collective love of a good yarn. Through the plot device of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, Chaucer interlocks narrators and stories of life-affirming colour and variety. We hear of a love triangle that escalates into war; a carpenter whose wife convinces him that floods are imminent so that he suspends himself from the roof of their house while she copulates with their lodger; three wayward young men who are told that a murderer named Death awaits them beneath an oak tree but, instead, find a supply of gold florins; a knight who is sentenced to execution by his king after he rapes a young woman, but is offered a pardon by the queen if he is able to discover what women desire most within a year and a day; a marquis who tests the loyalty of his wife by telling her that their children must die after they are born; and a blind old knight whose young wife connives to meet her lover atop a tree when she and the knight go for a walk in their garden, only to find her scheme scuppered by the gods.
Poulton’s approach in condensing the hefty work was to “look for a balance between characters and tales everybody knows and loves, and some of the unfamiliar tales”, and his adaptation was first produced by the RSC in 2005 to considerable acclaim. The new version is a joint endeavour by Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic and Halifax-based outfit Northern Broadsides, incorporating puppetry and following Broadsides’ traditional approach to costuming. We could point out that its director and composer is one Conrad Nelson, but suspect that you’re more likely to know him by another name that he assumed last year: as Iago in Northern Broadside’s Lenny Henry-starring production of Othello.
30 March - 17 April, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Playhouse Square, Quarry Hill, LS2 7UP, 0113 213 7800, 7.30pm (plus matinees on Thu 1 & 15 Apr at 1.30pm & Saturdays at 2pm), £16-26 (concs available)
Posted on Tuesday 9th March 2010
SW
West Yorkshire Playhouse
Playhouse Square, Quarry Hill, Leeds, LS2 7UP
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