All life meets on Chaucer's pilgrimage to Canterbury, as his Tales prove: tales of piety and bawdry, humour and tragedy, reality and fantasy, full of gleeful wit and pungent insights. Most of the pilgrims who set out from the Tabard Inn in Southwark are in need of the merit that a visit to the "holy blissful martyr" brings, and they all seek shriving. But they are not above a certain amount of swiving beforehand, and in this rumbustious version of the Tales they go to it with gusto.
      Mike Poulton's adaptation is a success: it is funny and energetic while remaining faithful to the original in feel and content. It gives the actors full scope to enjoy themselves, and they do: which means that the audience does so too. This is unabashedly theatre as fun, but it keeps alive the spirit of a classic, and it iterates a truth: that the human comedy remains the same in essence in all times and places, and the classics connect those times and places into the great chain of being that makes us what we are.
      This production is full of vigour and spirit. In the Miller's Tale bare bottoms duly appear in the appropriate place, because without them the jokes of the kiss and the ring cannot work, and this is theatre that truly works. When the carpenter gets his revenge on the miller, there is much swiving under the bedclothes in uproarious fashion. On the night this was seen, a distinguished Nobel laureate (of literature) was in the audience, and she was beside herself with laughter: a party of school children, boldly brought by their preceptors, were in stitches likewise; evidently, Chaucer and the RSC had worked their joint magic across the board.
AC Grayling