Youth Theatre puts fresh spin on Canterbury Tales

This year’s Senior Youth Theatre show will bring together The Courtyard’s three Youth Theatres: Hereford, Bromyard and Kington, who worked together last year to present War Game which received huge praise and critical acclaim.

"We chose The Canterbury Tales," says one of the show's two directors, Dan Pegler, "because we really wanted to bring them all together again as one whole performance. They really enjoyed last year's small production of War Game, so we needed to find something that could be directed in three different places before coming together on stage at The Courtyard."

That led to Dan and co-director Rebecca Cook considering a collection of tales, dismissing Grimms' Fairy Tales in favour of The Canterbury Tales. "It was the first thing written in vernacular English," says Dan, "before that everything had been written in Latin.

"So we thought we'd do it in a sort of Horrible Histories/Pythonesque style, but keeping the main stories."

They finally settled on six of the tales - The Wife of Bath, the Knight, The Franklin, The Reeve, The Miller and the Parson's Tale - and then set about removing the rudest bits to create a family friendly show with plenty of laughs and a lot of slapstick humour.

"We want the kids to enjoy it," says Dan, adding that the cast have "loved the exploration of the text and were actively involved, coming up with ideas of how to make the Tales suitable for a younger audience. Doing that has given them life skills which will be very useful if they want to go further in theatre."

With loads of (not quite as bawdy as the originals!) humour, The Canterbury Tales will deconstruct six of Chaucer's classice tales to offer a fresh perspective to all the family. .

The Canterbury Tales will be in The Courtyard’s Main House from Thursday, August 1 to Saturday, August 3 at 7.30pm. To book, call the box office on 01432 340555 or visit courtyard.org.uk