Interview - Conrad Nelson: Funny stories on a long trip to Canterbury

The associate director of Northern Broadsides is currently touring with a new stage version of The Canterbury Tales and with the opening soliloquy delivered in Middle English, a few minutes into the production he sometimes likes to take a look around the auditorium and watch the confusion unfold.

"You can see some people wondering what on earth they have paid their money to see," he says. "It's like hearing Shakespeare for the first time. You get the sense of what's being said and all the words are there, but not necessarily in the right order.

"After the opening, we drop the Middle English and sometimes you can hear the sense of relief, but I think it's an important opening and hopefully it conjures up the correct atmosphere and sets the scene for what will follow."

Chaucer's original tales were an epic affair. He had apparently planned to write 120 individual stories, but by the time of his death around the turn of the 15th-century just 24 had been completed.

However, even this partial work runs to some 500-odd pages and needed to be drastically slimmed down by writer Mike Poulton. The new adaptation was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Nelson's version continues to be faithful to Chaucer's original.

"There are some works which benefit from a modern setting," he says. "But with The Canterbury Tales it would have been little more than a gimmick.

"At its heart, it's about pure story telling. It doesn't need a lot of special effects or incredibly complex scenery, it's the words and how you get them across to the audience which is important.

"In all, we feature 10 of Chaucer's tales. Some, like the Miller's and the Wife of Bath's tales are fully realised and others appear in fragments. Like the original, the pilgrims are the mortar which holds the bricks of the stories together. They are a way of getting the audience to connect with what's happening on stage and everyone will have their favourite."

For Conrad, it's The Clerk's Tale of the peasant girl Griselda whose husband tests her loyalty in a series of bizarre torments.

Sending an officer to remove their baby daughter, his wife is told the child has been killed. The same happens following the birth of their son and to round off the misery the husband finally announces he has successfully sought an annulment and when he marries a new bride, Griselda must prepare the wedding feast. When the peasant girl duly obliges, her husband reveals the deception and they live happily ever after.

"What's really great about the Tales is how varied the stories are," he says. "People tend to remember the bawdy ones and characters like the Wife of Bath, but there is real depth and breadth.

"The story of Griselda is like a mini-opera and the challenge is bringing the drama contained on the page onto the stage."

Still, Nelson likes a challenge. Last year he starred as poisonous Iago alongside Lenny Henry in Northern Broadsides' production of Othello. The Halifax-based company knew they could be in line for a mauling by critics who felt the tragedy had somehow been dumbed down by the casting of Henry. However, the production was a commercial success and Henry was named best newcomer at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards with Nelson's performance similarly acclaimed.

"The experience of doing Othello was fantastic," he says. "All sorts of people turned up, who wouldn't normally have come to see Shakespeare or Northern Broadsides, but you're only as good as your last production. Thankfully since we've been touring with The Canterbury Tales

we have had some lovely reviews, but I always think you should never get carried away, you just have to keep your head down and keep working hard."

Nelson doesn't appear on stage for this production, which is the latest collaboration between Broadsides and the New Vic Theatre. There were, he says, too many other balls to juggle. With a cast of 16 actors playing 80 characters, enough musical instruments to start their own orchestra and the demands of combining puppetry into the action, The Canterbury Tales represents a major challenge for any director.

"I've always thought when it comes to theatre you should be ambitious," he says. "The most depressing thing would be to look back at the end of a run and think 'I wish we had taken a few more risks'."

The Canterbury Tales, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, to Apr 17. 0113 213 7700, www.wyp.org.uk

Canterbury Tales through the ages

Chaucer's work has inspired countless writers of fiction, stage and screen.

Science fiction author Dan Simmons wrote his Hugo Award winning novel Hyperion based around an extra-planetary group of pilgrims and Richard Dawkins used The Canterbury Tales as a structure for his 2004 book about evolution. In The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, his animal pilgrims each tell a story as they make their way to find their common ancestor.

Television adaptations include Alan Plater's 1975 re-telling of the stories in a series of plays for BBC2: Trinity Tales. In this adaptation, the stories were told by rugby league supporters on their way to a cup final at Wembley.

Six years ago, the BBC again featured modern re-tellings of selected tales, starring the likes of Julie Walters, Billie Piper and John Simm.