Broadside Bawdy

North­ern Broad­sides and the Can­ter­bury Tales.  The amaz­ing ver­sat­il­ity of this theatre troupe in the ser­vice of one of the great story-tellers of the Middle Ages.  A selec­tion of pil­grims plus a rather naïve poet who scribbles busily as they tell their tales.  Act­ors con­stantly change from pil­grims to char­ac­ters in the Tales, and even to dif­fer­ent pil­grims as they near Can­ter­bury.  There’s com­edy, and pathos, and bawdy.  It’s so dif­fi­cult to do bawdy on stage without just pro­du­cing some­thing vul­gar but here it was played straight — almost just as Chau­cer wrote it, with no extra unne­ces­sary sug­gest­ive­ness for the wised-up 21^st cen­tury audi­ence. Lan­guage a mod­ern­ised Middle Eng­lish — you had to listen, but if you did it all made sense.