THE appeal of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales continues with two new adaptations. Southwark Playhouse in South London offers an open-air telling of five of the best-known tales, including the Miller’s and the Wife of Bath’s, around the London borough’s parks and markets and near the site of the Tabard Inn where Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered for their journey to Canterbury. And in November the Royal Shakespeare Company presents the whole 19 tales, utilising three directors and a cast of 23.
The adaptor, Mike Poulton, acknowledges that the bawdiest stories may be the most accessible, but he wants to celebrate their variety, “the way they comment on each other and also include great tales of chivalry, nobility and legend”. The language, he says, is mysterious only when it is read; spoken aloud it suddenly becomes clear. “The characters are so lively, you can hear them talking. It’s as if a tape recorder had been left running in the 14th century,” says the Monty Python member and medievalist Terry Jones. But, he adds, “there’s a lot in what he doesn’t say”.
Jones is the co-author of Who Murdered Chaucer? (Methuen), in which he argues that the anticlericalism of The Canterbury Tales was no joke in the reign of Henry IV and Archbishop Arundel, who made it his business to eliminate heresy and even considered writing in the English language to be subversive. Did Chaucer’s most popular work contribute to his death?
Jones reads Chaucer in the original but is not too purist to applaud updatings: “I like the idea of doing it outdoors in Southwark; I’m surprised nobody thought of it before.” Gareth Machin, the artistic director of Southwark Playhouse, had that brainwave. He’ll be parading 150 members of the public along main South London thoroughfares. There will be a “community cast ” — people who live or work in Southwark — who will keep an eye open for problems while entertaining on the hoof. All will have a character, including an elderly man as Chaucer. With seven professional actors and two musicians, the company adds up to 29 — the number of pilgrims in Chaucer’s poem.
“I have tried to be faithful to the narrative within the tales,” says Machin, “but the interludes and the Prologue are original as they don’t exist in anything like dramatic form.” Sometimes subtlety has to be abandoned: “Chaucer might sit on the fence about, say, the Pardoner’s sexuality; we have to be explicit.”
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The Knight’s Tale will be acted out — including jousting — in St George’s Garden, off Borough High Street, protected by the remaining wall of the Marshalsea prison. The adventure playground in Little Dorrit Court provides useful furniture for the windows and boat of The Miller’s Tale. The evening ends with the Wife of Bath’s story in the Millennium Court next to Southwark C athedral.
Three hours on foot will not bring the modern-day pilgrims to Canterbury, but they will know a lot more about Chaucer’s Southwark. And they’ll be ready for a slurp of Pilgrim’s Ale.