Canterbury Tales

Synopsis

Canterbury Tales is a bawdy classic written 700 years ago, it centres on a group of pilgrims who entertain one another with stories as they ride to Canterbury Cathedral. But despite the apparently holy purpose of their journey these travellers reveal themselves as sinners rather than saints. The pilgrims contrasting and colourful backgrounds offer many different stories, from the serious and moral to the farcical and bawdy, proving that like Shakespeare after him, Chaucer was ‘not for an age but for all time .

Our Review:

25 March 2010

Northern Broadsides brings Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales very much to life with a great deal of lusty humour at the Liverpool Playhouse.

The sixteen-strong ensemble act out multiple roles, sing, dance and play instruments in a packed programme of several of the six-hundred-year old tales. There’s much bawdiness, simulated rumpy-pumpy, and references to nether regions. There’s even, for a brief moment, full frontal nudity, but it is all done in he best possible taste, as the late Liverpudlian Kenny Everett would have said.

It’s an action-packed show with much ribald humour and a romp through the best-known tales. In this show we see reflected myriad characters of the period - from the much-married Wife of Bath with her Prologue on women’s place in the world, to the rude Miller’s Tale with bare bottoms emulated by clever puppets and a red hot poker! We then have the Reeve’s tale with more ‘swyveing’ or cuckolding, lowering the ...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

No reviews yet

Click here to add your review