The Canterbury Tales – Half Cut Theatre – Touring Spring 2024

Their four-hander take on The Canterbury Tales is cheerful and richly funny. It gives us modern versions of the characters (James Camp’s Pardoner has morphed, rather wonderfully, into an estuary speaking estate agent and Georgia Leila Stoller’s Miller is the slimiest womaniser you’ve ever met) and updates on the tales which are acted out. The host becomes a pub owner named Geoff who might, just might, write some of these stories down and Hollie-Anne Price is a flirty Alison Bath who knows a thing or two about men. The stories are whacky but affectionate and in an odd way manage to strike a happy balance between respect and irreverence. As we progress along the A2 towards Canterbury (which always sounds funny to modern audiences, but of course that was more or less the old pilgrim route) we meet Chanticleer – cue for much stage business with inflated yellow rubber gloves. We also get a hammed-up tale of chivalry based on the Wife of Bath’s Tale and much more. It’s impressively slick.

There’s a lot of actor musicianship in this jolly show with all four actors contributing on instruments. Stoller is a fine (left handed) guitarist. Her instrument is azure blue and she sings with lyricism and oodles of character. And it’s fun when a piano keyboard, which Price then plays, emerges from the bar as an integral part of Hazel McIntosh’s set. There’s a good song based on the opening lines of Chaucer’s prologue and the four of them sing rather well in harmony: some good work, evidently, by Eden Tredwell, composer and musical director.