The Canterbury Tales - The Pantaloons

Like a lot of people, I studied part of The Canterbury Tales at school. I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t remember a great deal about the text – except that I remember thinking it wasn’t as difficult as I expected it to be.

At around the same time, I saw the film A Knight’s Tale, with Heath Ledger and Paul Bettany. So Chaucer was always that slightly impish Paul Bettany figure in my head.

These two vague notions are probably always going to inform any encounter I have with The Canterbury Tales. And happily, they fit right in with The Pantaloons’ take on the tales – which is not difficult at all, and definitely slightly impish.

I went to the Underground Theatre in Eastbourne to see The Pantaloons’ production of The Canterbury Tales (10^th Nov 2013). As soon as we walked in, we could feel a bit of a buzz in the air. The cast were in character, chatting with audience members – and, unlike the very reserved audience The Pantaloons had to play to at Michelham Priory in the summer (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with largely the same cast), this audience was chatting back.

It may have been partly because everyone seemed to know each other (as the cast remarked upon more than once), but there was definitely a friendly sort of atmosphere in the almost sold-out UGT.

And that atmosphere carried on right the way through this colourful, funny and energetic take on The Canterbury Tales. Incorporating song, rhyme, puppets, chickens, Shakespeare, opera, improvisation and more, The Pantaloons took us through each of Chaucer’s tales in turn. They’d even printed a list in the programme so you could mark which tales you liked best, and at the end they asked for our favourite. (I think it was the chickens that won the audience vote in Eastbourne).

I’d seen The Pantaloons do The Canterbury Tales before – a couple of years ago, with a different cast and out in the open air. Having only seen them perform outdoors before, I wasn’t sure how their style would translate to an indoor setting.

But it was great. The house lights were only half dimmed, so we could all still see each other (which helped with the audience interaction bits), and in a way I think the indoor setting actually helped to build the atmosphere. Walking through the doors into the auditorium was a bit like going through the wardrobe into Narnia. Outside was the normal, workaday world – and suddenly inside we were in the bright, boisterous Pantaloon-land.

I used to work front of house in a theatre, and one of my favourite parts of the job was seeing the audience leave with smiles on their faces at the end of a show. I think I would have enjoyed working for a Pantaloons performance.

The Pantaloons are currently on tour with The Canterbury Tales and Grimm Fairy Tales (which I’ll be seeing when they return to Eastbourne in December). See their website www.thepantaloons.co.uk for full tour details.