Here's a chance to step back in time, enter the convivial atmosphere of The Tabard Inn and welcome the characters of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on their return from their pilgrimage to Canterbury. The Marine Theatre, transformed for one night into the Tabard Inn in Southwark, is host to the Paper Bag Players from the Arts Centre in Crediton. They will act out their tales for your delight in Lyme Regis on Friday October 19 at 7.30pm.

"Each one of you shall help things slip, By telling stories on the outward trip"

With these words the Host of the Tabard Inn instructed the pilgrims before they set off for Canterbury, and now we see them return to the "Tabard" to tell their tales to the assembled company.

Hear about the rogues who set out to kill Death, enjoy a bed-hopping romp, learn about love and patience, see pride in the farmyard and help the knight in his research concerning a very important question. Sit down, order a drink from the host and be entertained by the characters and animals that appear in Chaucer's well-known tales.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, as Neville Coghill wrote of this noble poem "is the concise portrait of an entire nation: high and low, old and young, male and female, rogue and righteous, land and sea, town and country." The past has become magical to us through the great works of Epic poetry; where the Greeks had Homer, and the Roman's Virgil; the English have none other than Geoffrey Chaucer. Almost every social type of the fourteenth century is represented among the pilgrims such as a knight, lawyer, doctor, cook, miller, nun, merchant, monk, priest, squire and several others. Chaucer is also one of the pilgrims. The audience will recognise many of the characters as being reminiscent of their twenty-first century contemporaries.

The Marine Theatre is particularly pleased to welcome the Paper Bag Players as they have their roots in a production by the Colway Trust , Ann Jellicoe's famous company that created the Community Plays in the 1980's.

Ann Jellicoe gave a sell-out dramatised reading of "The Western Women" in the Marine Theatre during Lyme's recent Artsfest.

Tickets are available from the Lyme TIC 01297 442138 and are £8 for adults and £4 for under 16s; the stories for all over the age of 8.