As someone who studies English Literature, I engage with the medieval world in many ways. Most of these encounters are strictly academic: I parse editions of 14th-century poems and squint at manuscripts in the British Library from behind a wall of glass. On the other hand, I also have a soft spot for vaguely medieval-inspired content that bears very little linkage to the actual historical period—Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for instance, or “bardcore” renditions of pop songs. Either way, it’s easy to feel a thick film between myself and the stories: I either read them passively or only play with their aesthetic. Is it possible to bridge this gap? Can we (figuratively speaking) bring these manuscripts out of the recesses of the library and into the light of day?
For storytellers and performers such as Debbie Cannon and Lara McClure, the answer isn’t only that we can, but that we absolutely should. A few weeks ago, at an event hosted by the University of Cambridge, I had the privilege of watching Green Knight, Cannon’s one-woman dramatic retelling of the medieval poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Following her performance at the same event was Lara McClure’s Oral Tradition, a retelling of the Book of Leinster—a mythological account of ancient Ireland written in the 11th century. Both these individual shows premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival some time ago; Oral Tradition was first performed in 2024, and Green Knight 2018. While vastly different in tone and style, both shows demonstrate a palpable delight towards interacting with their respective source texts.
To understand Cannon’s work a little better, I had a conversation with her after the performance. For her, preserving the spirit of the medieval text proved to be a delicate task. “There were qualities [from the original poem] that I wanted to keep, such as the alliteration,” she explained, referring to the fact that each line of the original poem contains multiple words starting with the same consonant. Indeed, the script is highly alliterative in parts, lending a lovely flow to her speech. Her dedication to keeping the language of the source text in the spotlight also manifests in the play’s visual minimalism. Designed to be “completely portable”, as she says, the show doesn’t include much in the way of props, apart from a green scarf, a hand drum, and an apple. By stripping her performance down to its language, Cannon makes the spoken word the highlight of her performance, bringing her audience closer to her play’s written source.
Even as Cannon attempts to preserve the original text, however, she also asserts the need to respond to it creatively—in other words, to treat it as a dynamic living thing. At the centre of the original poem is the Arthurian knight Sir Gawain; the tale revolves around his dealings with a mysterious figure named Bertilak de Hautdesert and his seductive wife Lady Bertilak. In the play, however, the now-aging Lady Bertilak takes centre stage as the speaker. She’s a poignant figure, frustrated with the oppressive men in her life, deeply in love with Gawain, and terrified of being forgotten. To Cannon, ascribing this character depth to Lady Bertilak is in itself an act of preservation: it keeps the story of the medieval woman alive. “That was a theme I wanted to pick up on, the idea of all these people who are lost and forgotten,” she explained. “And that’s a big element of women’s stories; we don’t hear their voices.”
If anything, taking certain creative liberties might be an effective way of keeping the spirit of storytelling itself alive. Lara McClure, for instance, draws her audience into some of the most hyperbolic sections in the early medieval Book of Leinster, relating the exploits of several mythological Irish heroines with gusto. She, too, relies on virtually no props, which allows her raunchy, spirited speech to shine. Approximately ten minutes into the show, she informs her audience of the superlative genital size of King Fergus mac Róich (measured, apparently, in fists). Like Cannon’s Green Knight, her performance ends with a plea to the audience to continue telling stories, but with an added request: “Please exaggerate”. After the show, I flipped the question on her: how much did she exaggerate? Her grinning answer: “Plenty.” Most of us who came to the performance are still talking about Fergus, so it’s safe to say her strategy worked—his story is alive and well.
In a way, oral storytelling is a particularly fitting way of engaging with medieval texts such as ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and the Book of Leinster; myths, after all, are passed down through generations and generations by word of mouth. If Cannon’s and McClure’s performances are any indication, continuing this tradition provides us with a wonderfully dynamic way of interacting with the past. We allow it to evolve, we respond to it, and—sometimes—we blow some facts out of proportion. Instead of gazing at these texts at a remove or ignoring them altogether, we treat them as living things that grow alongside us.
Words by Keziah Cho
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