Gargantua

Synopsis

Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais. Dramatised by Lavinia Murray.

Ep 1 Gargantua

The bawdy, exuburant adventures of medieval giants. A dizzying blend of fantasy, comedy, philosophy and scatological humour. The world's a messy place. Episode 1 depicts the young life of the giant Gargantua, who is reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors.

Rabelais...David Troughton
Gargantua..Robert Wilfort
Grangousier..Eric Potts
Gargamelle..Melissa Jane Sinden
Holofornes/Friar Jean..Jonathan Keeble
Panochrates..Malcolm Raeburn
Eudomon/Sun..Kathryn Hunt

Producer Gary Brown

Gargantua (ep 1) depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight.

This tale is a dizzying blend of fantasy, comedy, philosophy and scatological humour. The world's a messy place. All the big mock-heroic novels that followed - Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Gulliver's Travels, Ulysses - are about mess, they're about slops and slime, encyclopedic in their efforts to encompass humanity in all its bawdy, chaotic, grungy, and painful reality. And like Gargantua and Pantagruel they're also very funny. The Rabelaisian world view is founded on the assumption that the humourless are not yet wise - and these tales insist you learn to laugh at humanity.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is dramatised by Lavinia Murray, one of our leading radio playwrights whose credits include 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' and 'The Confessions of an English Opium Eater'.