Review by Steve Bennett

He’s clearly a brilliantly talented rapper, but Baba Brinkman’s reworking of stories from Chaucer’s epic anthology can’t quite escape the shadow of a trendy teacher striving to make the classics hip and relevant, but in the process compromising both artforms.

This show is probably also misclassified as ‘comedy’, for although the Canadian presents an irreverent take on the 14th Century tales, they are only mildly funny. He has one great joke, a new phrase for men’s Darwinian desire to control women’s behaviour and sexuality, but the rest is wryly diverting at best, and would probably play better to a theatre crowd.

He has, necessarily, focussed on just a small selection of yarns from the original, including The Pardoner’s Tale – told as a Tarantinoesque gangster story  – or The Wife Of Bath, the original ‘cougar’. The yarns themselves stay pretty much intact, it’s only the storytelling style that’s been updated, replete with modern-day references to celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson.

Brinkman has a degree in comparative literature, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he’s remained faithful(ish) to the original. Between the Eminem-style raps, he explains how ideas such as 50 Cent’s ‘get rich or die tryin’ or Ludacris’s ‘hos in every area code’ have direct parallels with Chaucer. After all, human behaviour hasn’t changed in 600 years, he says, stressing the relevance.

He makes a decent case, and the show certainly sparks some curiosity about the Canterbury Tales, which is one of his stated aims. The tales and fables have stuck round for long enough to be decent stories, and Brinkman certainly has the flow and the attitude to pull them off, even unfazed by playing to a house that’s just five per cent full (15 people in the 300-seater Cow Barn).

The rhymes are backed by onstage DJ Mr. Simmonds, who also wrote the music to the show, and video projections by Erik Pearson. It’s slickly done, but even with the updates, Brinkman’s reimagining of the tales has too few surprises, and still feels if its roots are more in education than entertainment.

Review date: 2 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square