Low Down
The Canterbury Tales are brought innovatively to life by rap genius Baba Brinkman Unmissable theatre-story-rap.
Review
'The Rap Canterbury Tales' is a rendering Chaucer's tales from middle-English into modern rap. If that was all it was, it would be a gimmick. This is no gimmick. The setting is the story of a stowaway on a Rappers' tour bus. Witnessing what the famous Rapmeisters get up to "backstage", he becomes part of a rappers' competition to free rap stories on their road to somewhere.
Baba Brinkman, a rap artist from Vancouver with a Master's Degree is Medieval Literature has crafted a humorous, engaging and, I would say ground-breaking crossover piece that is, all at once, storytelling, live poetry, rap, and theatre (with some excellently illustrated projected slides thrown in for good measure. The audience was not only under thirties, and I saw more than a few grey-haireds (myself included), tapping their feet and watching in awe at a genius writer, performer and rapper at work.
As a theatre reviews site, let's judge this as theatre. Staging is simple, needing nothing more than the multi-talented single performer to bring three tales to life - we are treated to tales from the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath and the Miller.
The character fell a bit on the Wife of Bath's Tale, told by a female rapper, Brinkman lost the female character voice as he got more into the rap. Apart from that, he creates a whole cast of characters and plays them humorously and with skill.
And that's both the challenge and the delight of rap-storytelling. The beat can turn the listening off, appealing to the sub-conscious to foot-tap and enter the music. But the words come nineteen to the dozen, demanding to be heard, to be listened so - clever rhymes, scanning and meter, through the wit of the verse, and the sheer pace of the narrative.
Rap pulls you in two directions and it works best when the content surfs on the waves of music and rhythm. If this were pure theatre, it would be a dense, text-heavy play. The rap-style often lifts the words off the stage and makes them fly, enlivening the language. It works most of the time, demanding much of both performer and audience in the process. Listen to every word of the tale, or you will lose your way quickly.
Brinkman is such a fine performer that he pulls it off with ease. He brings The Canterbury Tales into the 21st Century, making them accessible for new generations. His poetic interlude when his character is asked to "sing for his supper" halfway through is, in my view, unnecessary to the piece (fine though it is as poetry); it's the Tales we have come to see and hear. That said, this is ground-breaking, vibrant and wonderful theatre and story-performance. You won't see anything else quite like it on the Fringe.
Reviewed by PL 16th August 2007
