Knights' Tale

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

Ever since I was a young boy I’ve been fascinated by the romances of mediaeval Europe, the stories of knights and their ladies, kings and princesses, 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 play, Two Noble Kinsmen, written by Shakespeare in collaboration with his colleague John Fletcher, has always puzzled me as it has so many fine elements characteristic of his late work, but is fatally flawed both 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 Koichi Domoto and Yoshio Inoue, I returned to the play wondering if it was worth another look and though I at first retained my initial resistance, I started to wonder what had motivated Shakespeare and Fletcher to attempt a dramatisation of the Chaucer tale. 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 another problem must have beset him. He had, in a sense, already written his version of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale much earlier in his creative life.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written nearly 20 years earlier, 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 attractive young heroines Hermia and Helena – and 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. In particular, I was intrigued by the mention in one of the earliest scenes of a missing character, a girl called Flavina – who is never again mentioned in the play. This is most unusual in Shakespeare’s plots. 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 the fact that there is 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 story. 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 great temerity that I took it upon myself to write my own version of this ancient story, I am very happy to have given the ladies just as much power and heart and honour as their knightly ‘masters’ and to have given the noble kinsmen a little less nobility and a little more kindness.

John Caird — 2018