Knights' Tale

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For more production photographs, please refer to the 2021 revival page.

Knights' Tale is based on 'Teseida' by Giovanni Boccaccio, 'The Knight's Tale' by Geoffrey Chaucer and 'Two Noble Kinsmen' by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare.

John Caird wrote the book, Paul Gordon wrote the music and lyrics, Maoko Imai wrote the Japanese book and lyrics and Brad Haak arranged and orchestrated Paul Gordon's score.

Presented by Toho Company, this world premiére production was mounted at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo on 27th July 2018. It ran there for a month before touring to the Umeda Arts Theatre in Osaka, where it ran until the 15th October.

Because of the Covid crisis, the plan to revive it in 2020 had to be postponed. Instead it was performed in a concert version for two weeks in Tokyo, playing at the Geigeki Concert Hall in Ikebukuro and at Opera City Concert Hall, from August 10th-22nd. Brad Haak re-orchestrated the score for a full symphony orchestra and it was performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic, conducted by Yuji Wakabayashi, with John Caird directing the concert over video link from London.

It was fully revived a year later, opening in Osaka on the 7th September 2021, and touring to Tokyo and Hakata, where it closed on the 29th November 2021.

Director's Notes

From my early childhood I’ve been fascinated by the romances of mediaeval Europe, the stories of knights and their ladies, kings and princes, sorcerers and witches, wandering woods and mythical beasts. These are the landscapes of Boccaccio and Chaucer, Mallory and Spencer and in modern times, the magical worlds created by T.H.White, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien.My admiration for these tales survived into adulthood and was deepened by my love for the late romances of Shakespeare’s final years, Pericles, Cymbeline and A Winter’s Tale. But one late play, Two Noble Kinsmen, written by Shakespeare in collaboration with his colleague John Fletcher, has always puzzled me. It has so many elements characteristic of his late work but seems fatally flawed by an incoherence in its narrative structure and by a typical weakness in stories based on the mediaeval romantic tradition, a complete lack of interest in the nature, motivations and personalities of its female characters.

When the Toho Company asked me to consider creating a piece for two of their young stars, Koichi Domoto and Yoshio Inoue, I returned to the play wondering if it was worth another look. After a first reading, I started to imagine what might have motivated Shakespeare and Fletcher to attempt a dramatisation of the Bocaccio and Chaucer tales. The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. Shakespeare had more or less retired when he started his collaboration on the play. He had said farewell to the theatre with The Tempest and clearly had little appetite to write another original work. But a further problem must have beset him. He had, in a sense, already written his version of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale much earlier in his creative life. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he had used the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta, turned Palamon and Arcite into Lysander and Demetrius and converted a single princess, Emilia, into two equally interesting young heroines, Hermia and Helena. In the process he created one of the greatest comedies ever written. So, when Fletcher came along suggesting another version of The Knight’s Tale, his spirits must have fallen somewhat.

But the more I looked at the plot of Two Noble Kinsmen, the more of the essential Shakespearean richness I discovered. I was particularly intrigued by the mention in one of the earliest scenes of a missing character, a young woman called Flavina – who is never again mentioned in the play. This is most unusual in Shakespeare. If he mentions a lost character at the beginning of a play, you would expect her to turn up at some point later in the story. This omission is made all the more flagrant by there being a nameless character in the story known only by her family epithet; she is simply ‘the jailor’s daughter’ and remains so for the whole of the play.Her fate in Two Noble Kinsmen is so unspeakably old-fashioned and misogynistic that the play is more or less unperformable today. But if you make a connection between the jailor’s daughter and the lost character Flavina, the plot becomes far more interesting, more romantic and more comedic. Taking advantage of this opportunity also encouraged me to give the characters of Hippolyta and Emilia more strength and self-possession than they have in either of the sources for Two Noble Kinsmen or in the play itself.

So, while it was with some temerity that I set about writing my own version of this ancient tale, I am very happy to have given the women in the story a great deal more power and heart and wit than their knightly ‘masters’ and to have given the kinsmen themselves some touches of humour, humility and humanity to set alongside their crippling sense of honour and entitlement.

Shakespeare puristsmust forgive my wholesale pillaging of the opening Chorus of Henry V for the creation of an opening ensemble number, setting out the origin and themes of the play and allowing our two knights, Palamon and Arcite, to start telling the story in their own way. This number also sets up the musical structure of the show, allowing my co-conspirator Paul Gordon full rein to write both serious and comic songs in the subsequent story, including emotional ballads for all the main characters.

There are two further themes suggested by the sources of the story that have been made to resonate more strongly for today’s audience. It is easy to see how the over-riding theme of masculine honour can be converted to contain a potent anti-war sentiment, especially when it becomes a plot denouement in the voices of the female characters. Similarly, Gerald and his forest dancers can become advocates for the preservation of the natural world that is their home, a theme originally suggested in Bocaccio’s description of the destruction of the forest as a preparation for battle.

Finally, in bringing the story to a happy conclusion, I have deployed one of Shakespeare’s most common late play devices, the deus ex machina. Like Hymen in As You Like It, Jupiter in Cymbeline, or Juno and Ceres in The Tempest, the presiding deity of Athens appears at the end to bless the wit, intelligence and sanity of our enterprising heroines.

John Caird