Oxford's oldest student newspaper

Independent since 1920

Review: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Transforming a14th century alliterative poem into a modern stage play isn’t an easy feat. There were moments where Simon Corble’s adaptation managed to do it brilliantly. On entering the theatre, the audience’s nostrils were filled with the smell of steaming turf, which had been dug up and laid out on the stage. The crowd, with iPhones and designer trainers, found themselves sitting in an ancient glade.

The advances of the Green Knight’s unsatisfied wife Alison (Mary Clapp) were similarly brought up to date, receiving sitcom-like treatment. Duncan Cornish played a wonderfully gawky Gawain as Alison came to his bedside for ‘lessons in love’. ‘My body is all yours’, she proclaimed. ‘How incredibly kind’, parried our model English gentleman.

However, the adaptation was long on words, and short on action. Indeed Gawain’s plea to Lord Bertilak, ‘spare me more speech’, could have applied to the whole play. Gawain is a fast-paced poem, with alliteration and rhyming ‘bob and wheel’ sections pushing the narrative forward. But Corble’s adaptation hardly got off the ground in the first half, and the plot felt too densely packed into the second.

The poem’s masterfully simple story got lost, in part owing to the insistence on mock-archaic language. ‘Thees’ and ‘thys’ peppered Corble’s script, and though this did enable him to get an occasional laugh, punning, for instance, on Middle English wot, ‘to know’, and modern English ‘what’, sometimes this seemed to be at the expense of the narrative.

The audience appeared to enjoy the performance most when the tale made use of the modern vernacular, and perhaps this might be taken as a hint as to where the play should have gone. References to ‘Wowain’ the ‘handsome h Dom Kurzejaunk’ met with applause and laughter, as did slang from Bertilak (aka the Green Knight), played by Dom Kurzeja, and James Aldred as Gawain’s guide. Corble might take a leaf out of Simon Armitage’s fresh, dynamic 2007 translation of Gawain, which Armitage discussed at Keble earlier this term.

Ultimately, this was a brave attempt to juggle the authentic and the modern, but it didn’t quite succeed. However, mention must be made of Lucie Dawkins’ superbly captivating puppet animals, which in places managed to bring this production to life where so often the language struggled. 

Check out our other content

Most Popular Articles