RAUCOUS and riotous are just two of the words used to describe a show coming to Salisbury Playhouse next week.

Tacit Theatre will be performing their version of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, interweaving song and music with the 600-year-old tales that are still so vivid and scandalous.

The tales have been adapted by Tom Daplyn who, among other parts, plays Harry Bailey, Chaucer’s landlord.

Among the cast is Rosalind Blessed who will be playing the much-married, wimple-wearing feminist The Wife of Bath, a character with a twinkle in her eye.

Blessed, the daughter of actors Brian Blessed and Hildegarde Neil, said she is looking forward to performing in Salisbury. She said: “It’s such an awful lot of fun. If you consider when The Canterbury Tales were written, they are so forward thinking.”

The show promises to include the audience in some of the mischief.

Blessed explained: “We head out into the audience and they get really involved. We will try to get people to sing along with us.

“There is instrument-playing, but not by me. I can just about bang things together.”

She thinks the pluses and minuses of having famous actor parents probably cancel each other out.

But she admits to sharing a character trait with her father.

She said: “Like him, I am pretty loud.

I grew up around the theatre and watched both my parents in shows.

Both of them have been a massive inspiration to me. I was quite academic when I was a kid and thought about doing something with chemistry or history, but acting has always given me the most joy.

“At school, people were aware of my dad. He would creep up to the window and make faces. He once hit me over the head with a loaf of bread.”

She has done some voiceover work with her father but never been on stage with him. “That would be great,” she said.

The Canterbury Tales runs from Monday, March 10 to Saturday, March 15.