The Canterbury Tales
At Southwark Playhouse
reviewed for Exeunt
***
As if there weren’t already enough, there’s a new tavern under the arches of London Bridge. It’s a rough and ready affair, of the kind not seen for a few centuries, all wooden benches, wenches with tankards, and the odd chicken clucking round your feet. But the welcome is warm enough, and if you’re lucky you’ll be treated to some joyously raucous storytelling courtesy of Chaucer’s pilgrims: this isn’t any old tavern – it’s the re-incarnated Tabard Inn, the home to his Canterbury Tales.
The Southwark Playhouse main space finds itself transformed into a fully-functioning inn for this thoroughly immersive re-telling of Chaucer’s tales of moral, religious and sexual corruption. After an atmospheric opening of spoken Middle English, poetic in its incomprehensibility, John Canmore’s well-meaning proprietor lays out the ground rules – don’t let your tankard run dry – in a language everyone understands. Wasting no time the cast then hurl themselves into telling ‘The Knight’s Tale’, with Harry Napier’s Arcité and Matt Salisbury’s Palamon battling it out so violently that you fear for their safety, that is until you realise that they wield violin bows as weapons and cymbals as shields.
Noise, music and song consistently fill the room, with live sound effects cartoonishly animating the stories, and the characterful, dynamic Theone Rashleigh leading mass singalongs which threaten to become more enjoyable than the action itself. By the end, the abundantly flowing ale certainly seems to have had the desire effect, with the audience as hearty in voice as the actors and launching into song at the least encouragement. Meanwhile the cast juggle ukulele, banjo and washboard between them, belting out new arrangements of traditional folk songs like Mumford and Sons doing 14th century storytelling.
At times, clarity is lost in the commotion and cavernous space, and with the actors mingling about, striking up conversation with the punters, or hurling competitive jibes at one another, there is always something to be distracted by. Yet this is not quite fatal to the storytelling experience, as the pilgrims or their characters are so clearly portrayed by the cast that you can usually decipher the moral to the tale. Sexual politics are teased by Rosalind Blessed’s Wife of Bath, and it doesn’t take much to realise Simon Lloyd’s Miller is a drunkard or Harry Napier’s Pardoner is wicked through and through, while Ellie Moore flits from enwreathed maidenhood to bottom-baring adulteress with ease.
There is certainly a playfulness and bawdiness that pervades the whole evening, so that the subtler points of social commentary in Chaucer’s work gets lost amongst countless bonking gags and enough ball-scratching that you risk being put off your mulled wine. As our host duly acknowledges, the rogues in these tales don’t always get the comeuppance they deserve, but everyone’s having such fun that it would seem unfestive to complain.
Posted on December 12, 2011
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