Having last year brought their beat poet elegy Kerouac: And All That Jazz to the Fringe, Theatre on the Edge has followed it up with a radically different tempo and style of performance, taking Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century The Canterbury Tales and reworking it into a modern-day pilgrimage as a busload of tourists wend their way to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Here, the bus driver, Geoffrey (Chris Gruca), tries to corral the disparate group by having them strike up a story-telling competition, where such colourful characters as ex-squaddie Ryan Knight (Lee Roberts) and the lecherous drunkard Rob Miller (Ryan Fox) take turns to recite stories they know to win a free curry.
It’s a nice idea, and the group positively bounces with energy, interacting with the audience and playing it all up in a very gigglesome way that would well suit an evening show where everyone present has sunk a few drinks and feels more in the spirit of things. But there’s something vaguely community-theatre about the whole debacle, which makes it feel a lot less polished than it could be.
The stories themselves are a curious choice. Writer and director Barrie Wheatley has reworked Chaucer’s stories to more or less a modernised version. In the case of Rob Miller’s story, The Miller’s Tale is more or less the same with a few minor tweaks, even down to its racier and more repugnant moments. And there are laughs to be found here, although not nearly as many as the company clearly hoped.
Yet the more heavily adapted parts, such as The Pardoner’s Tale of drunken youths, the spectre of death and a pot of gold or The Wife of Bath’s Tale about a knight who ravishes an innocent maiden are adapted beyond almost all recognition, spun out into parables of greedy youths at gay nightclubs and a predatory Weinstein-esque filmmaker getting his comeuppance. But the stories no longer play out like stories; they’re rushed, and in the case of the final tale, so sped through that the ending doesn’t even entirely make sense.
As a result, it’s a performance that, while well meant, feels underbaked, hurried and unsatisfying, which at the asking price of £12 a ticket (which is even joked about during the play) feels like asking a lot for what really isn’t a polished enough play at this year’s Fringe.