The Canterbury Tales – Liverpool Playhouse

Writer: Geoffrey Chaucer

Adaptor: Mike Poulton

Reviewer: Stephanie Rowe

The Public Reviews Rating:

Having studied Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at O’level, I was looking forward to seeing this version of the classic tale.

Chaucer and twenty nine other pilgrims set of from the Tabard Inn on pilgrimage to St Thomas Becket’s Shrine in Canterbury, it is as they are setting of on their journey that the Inn Keeper issues them a challenge each pilgrim will tell a tale on their journey and the person with the best tale will receive a fine meal from the inn up on their return and so they set of with the knight telling his story first. Obviously all twenty nine tales could not possibly be shown in an evening unless you were prepared to still be there at dawn, so we are subjected to just a few of them.

The sixteen actors all gave a fantastic performance using many facial expressions and sound effects to get their points across, it had humour in parts but in places the humour was over the top becoming somewhat farcical. From what I remember of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales there were one or two tales that were close to the knuckle, but this version took this to the extremes with the tales storylines going from crude to downright disgusting, thou give credit where it is due the language of old English in verse form was well executed with an abrupt stop where lewd words should have been spoken, this gave way to much laughter from the younger generation of the audience and much tutting from the older one.

The use of puppetry by Lee Threadgold in this play was well implemented with a blanket being turned into a dog and a baby to name just a couple of its uses, in fact the whole set designed by Lis Evans was well used from the simple pallets that made up the walls of the hostelry to the ladders used as windmill sails, each item had a use and was duly utilized well. The lighting by Richard G Jones added to the atmosphere of the setting with old world lanterns on the stage that gave the image of stars in the night sky and extra sparkle on the faces of the actors.

Costumes were all within keeping of the fourteenth century and the actors appeared unshaven as would have been the case with most of the men of that time, and Dawn Outhwaite certainly makes things as close to the real thing as is possible.

All in all the show was not what I had anticipated and left me feeling rather deflated and let down, this is by no means a critique of the wonderful cast who certainly surpassed themselves with their ability to carry out this play under the direction of Conrad Nelson, but rather an analysis of the whole tale.