Chaucer in the Sky
with Diamonds
at C (Venue 34), Edinburgh

Munira Mirza

Chaucer in the Sky with Diamonds is dubbed as a reworking of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales for the noughties.

However, removing the medieval language, the ongoing narrative thread and concentrating on six of the most famous tales, this production is less about making Chaucer accessible and more about taking his literary masterpiece as a starting point to explore the comic themes of human behaviour. The production thrusts the Middle Ages story (quite insistently) into the 1990s of Blair's Britain and paedophile scares. Instead of being a group of pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Canterbury, the characters become passengers on a railway platform and the narration is conducted by the station personnel. The local newspaper's storytelling competition prompts characters to come from nowhere to narrate their own vignettes of moral instruction.

The referred link to Chaucer is utterly superficial and this production would be better judged on its own terms as a piece of original comedy. Each tale is true to the original sentiment of being irreverent, but the humour is based less in language and more on theatrical farce and bawdiness. The characters are diverse and hilarious, with their own idiosyncrasies and accents, which make for very entertaining theatre. The high point has to be the translation of the character of the alchemist into a Blair-like politican, who tricks an innocent family into thinking he is from the future and can win them the national lottery. It is an enjoyable theatrical experience but it would be misleading to say it is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.