The Ambridge Socialist Review of Lynda Snell’s production of The Canterbury Tales: searching for a moral economy

The Ambridge Socialist Review of Lynda Snell’s production of The Canterbury Tales searching for a moral economy

The BBC has kindly broadcast both halves of the Ambridge production of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

It is worth two hours or so of your time, (link below)

The First Half

The Knight’s Tale goes on a bit and takes up the best part of half the time. The knight is the only really solid bourgeois character in the Tales and the story is inevitably about honour and appropriate behaviours (and death).

The Miller’s Tale is rather more entertaining (featuring Eddie Grundy as the Miller) and has farting and false bottom jokes. Rather more centrally Chaucerian one might say.

The Wife of Bath’s Tale (Lilian of course) features Lynda Snell as a crone which appears to be typecasting at least until the last few lines.

The Sailor’s Tale (featuring Jazzer) is a brief end note about infidelity (another favourite Chaucerian theme) and money.

The Second Half

The Pardoner’s Tale is about greed and death and the relationship between the two. Susan Carter who sells poison as a chemist might reasonably complain about typecasting

The Friar’s Tale essentially about the doubtful behaviour of public officials and ultimately the hell that they’ll go to displayed, in the view of the Ambridge Socialist critic, some particularly good character acting

The Franklin’s Tale features Peggy Woolley as a magician (but not quite ‘just like that’) is a tale of honour where nothing that much really happens. A sort of Chaucerian interlude of lighter relief

The Bailiff’s Tale

This, in the Snell version of the Tales, is essentially a sequel to the Miller’s Tale in the first half. The miller is involved in trying to cheat people out of their due amount of wheat, while two students who appear to expose him also cheat on him. It is a tale of morals and moral economy involving revelry and, as in the first half, ‘The miller is broadcasting from both ends’. Great bawdy stuff.

An entertaining seasonal diversion, decently acted and underneath perhaps is a concept of the moral economy of Ambridge. The characters are what would today be called middle class to one degree or another (the concept did not exist in Chaucerian times) struggling to find out what behaviours and morality are appropriate or otherwise in changing times.

Link

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001x3r