Low-down, dirty Tales

Blame the spirit of the times or just enjoy it: scenes of low-life sexuality, rather than narratives of chivalric romance and moral allegories, are the main attraction in this buoyant, comically propelled distillation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Adrian Lee's lovely score for a three-strong band and songs for many voices abounds with period pastiche.

Mike Poulton's adaptation, replacing the dated, rhyming couplets of Nevill Coghill's version, comes with an easy, elegant turn of phrase and almost invariably resists the lure of contemporary, yob-speak. In the narrative role of Chaucer, Mark Hadfield sets the right, wry, low-key tone and in an anachronistic outburst raps in imitation of Eminem.

This marathon entertainment in two theatrical parts, each lasting about two-and-a-half hours, was greeted with rapture at its 2005 Stratford-upon-Avon premiere. I came away delighted by this brilliant company's exuberant evocation of Chaucer's gleeful depiction of freelance sex without guilt and by the witty, stylised theatricality of the production by Gregory Doran, Rebecca Gatward and Jonathan Mumby.

Michael Vale's set, with its single, toy-like tree and bare landscape with silhouetted figures passing by, creates a mood of characteristic, almost infantile make-believe. Knights ride out on pantomimic horses or with horse heads. That tree becomes the site for sex. Darren Tunstall's cuckolded carpenter with the silliest walk and headgear imaginable, Christopher Godwin's ancient, randy knight licking and pumping his horrified young bride as if he were a clockwork lecher and the farting, snoring bedhoppers of the Reeve's Tale whose sex-drives run on automatic all cleverly unite the farcical and comic.

Unfortunately there are glaring faults. All the fun comes in the first part, the second is a long let-down. There is no narrative momentum, a reluctance to catch Chaucer's variety of form and content. The Wife of Bath's strange and haunting story of erotic obsession, for example, with Nick Barber's impressive, seriously grief-struck knight, is skimped. A three-hour selection of Canterbury Tales, in all their Chaucerian diversity, would better fit the theatrical bill.

Until 30 Sept (0870 950 0915).

The Canterbury Tales - Part One