The Frome to Canterbury Tales

The Frome Drama team is providing the perfect escape from the current gloom by transporting audiences back to Frome in the 1950s, in their lively new production The Frome to Canterbury Tales. The show runs from 16th to 19th November at the Merlin Theatre.

Chaucer’s vivid characters, the story of their pilgrimage, and the gripping and often raunchy Tales they tell on their way, are updated to the early 1950s in this new and original adaptation of ‘The Canterbury Tales’, full of life, energy and humour.

A mystery bus tour has attracted a disparate collection of travellers, all based on Chaucer’s pilgrims, and all with their own reasons to want three days away from Frome. Bus driver Geoff Chaucer and pub landlady Gwen Host suggest they all take turns to tell stories to enliven the lunch stops and evening camps, and so the fun begins…

The show stars familiar faces as well as some new talent to Frome Drama. Serena Dunlop plays Diana Friar, adapted from Chaucer’s ‘wanton and merry Friar’ from the Canterbury Tales. Serena played the lead role in the Frome Drama festival production Silence in the summer and has also starred as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde at the Theatre Royal Bath. Sandra Gaisford is well known to many in Frome who had a pint or two in the Griffin in days gone by and she slips into the role of pub landlady Gwen Host perfectly in this production. Sandra recently delighted audiences at the Woodlanders Variety Show, East Woodlands.

Conceived to celebrate Frome Drama’s 75th anniversary, written and directed by Gill Morrell and with original live 50s style music by Laurence Parnell, the Tales – visual, entertaining and often very funny – are acted out by the travellers, whose own lives, ambitions and faults are also revealed as the play progresses.