The innovative Aquila Theatre Company has become somewhat of a staple in the Bermuda Festival line-up. Each year the New York-based company offers very different performances to enjoy, however, and this year it brought takes on Shakespeare’s classic ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’.

At a pre-performance talk for the latter on Friday evening, the company’s artistic director Peter Meineck said that adapting Chaucer’s framed story was a unique challenge but one which proved fruitful. Mr. Meineck took seven of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ to make up the body of Aquila’s offering on Friday and Saturday nights - the festival’s final performances of the year.

He also, however, took Chaucer’s Dark Ages characters and attempted to find modern equivalents in whom to play out their tales - which have at heart variations on the themes of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, envy, wrath, lust, glottony and sloth.

As such ‘The Wife of Bath’ is recast as a powerful female CEO who intimidates men while claiming as many husbands as she pleases. And the knights of ‘The Knight’s Tale’ become two imprisoned soldiers, somewhere in the Middle East.

As a result, and true to Chaucer’s form, the performance has a tendency to feel like a series of separate short plays, which are then wrapped together by the seven deadly sins theme and the framework of the characters’ storytelling and pilgrammage to Canterbury.

As such, the tales presented are extremely varied in flavour - from serious and dark to playfully naughty. Mr. Meineck said one of the joys of adapting Chaucer was that his work was so “naughty, frisky and also dangerous”.

To overcome the challenges of working with the text’s Middle English, he took the metre of Chaucer and stayed true to it, while amending the words that no longer find use in modern ages. Friday’s audience seemed well able to follow the action, so the company has done an admirable job of translating the 14th century text to the stage.

Probably the most fun of the tales enacted was the lusty adapatation of ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Mr. Meineck sets the cuckolded Miller in the Southern USA with his gun and his booze as well as his 18-year-old bride. The toilet-humour trickery comes off remarkably well in this setting as the Miller has the last laugh over his cheating bride, Alison, as well as Nicholas and Absolon.

Coming immediately after ‘The Knight’s Tale’ in the performance, ‘The Miller’s Tale’ also immediately showed off the range and skill of Aquila’s group of actors — Kenn Saberton, Louis Butelli, Lindsay Rae Taylor, Andrew Schwartz, Basienka Blake and Jonathan Braithwaite. Against a backdrop of minor costume changes and a minimalist set, their changes in body language and demeanour are relied upon for transporting the audience in time and place — and to see an actor jump from tortured soldier to gun-toting redneck in a matter of minutes is highly impressive.

Aquila did a wonderful balancing act between the gross out humour of the ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Summoner’s Tale’ - an entire tale based around expelling gas — and the serious themes of greed and death in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and ‘The Friar’s Tale’. With the talented cast crossing the genres seamlessly, this was one of the best Aquila shows that I have seen at the festival in years.

There were portions of the tales that I did not enjoy as much as others. For example, ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ simply failed to interest me in the fate of the characters or the reasons for their actions. It came off dull when it should have been tense and frightening. However, ‘The Canterbury Tales’ in its totality made for a wonderful, thinking and laughing evening of theatre.

I hope Aquila will be back next year as well, and offer something equally free-thinking yet classic.