Review: The (Modern) Canterbury Tales at The Beacon Centre

Each Tale was a separate entity with a narrator describing the action in comic Chaucerian verse brought cleverly up to date. When they weren't downright vulgar, like the Miller's Tale, they were performed subtly and with dead-pan humour which made them all the funnier.
Jeff Walker, for example, as the scholarly narrator of the Nun*s Priest's Tale' was in ridiculous contrast with his subject: a chicken run with the ladies in the cast posturing as murmuring hens, complete with scarlet high heels and coxcombs. Karim Kronfli was superb as the crowing cockerel, Julia Carter was his caring consort Pertelote.
For bawdiness full marks to The Reeve*s Tale. Two Cambridge undergraduates played with extreme exaggeration by James Taylor and Andy Scott, ravished for all to see both the wife of the Reeve, played with great humour by Cindy Linley, (also the narrator in The Wife of Bath), and his daughter Molly too, (Nicola Baggott).
The show was so wide-ranging that there were three Directors headed by Helen Sharman as Executive Director, who was also on stage as presenter.
Cuckolding, thieving, double-crossing and more were all there in this vaudeville of a show which, as Chaucer intended, had serious overtones. I think he would have enjoyed it.