The arrogant cock of the walk Chanticleer strutted his stuff to the Rolling Stones’ Little Red Rooster in last week’s excellent production of The Canterbury Tales by 16/22, the resident young company at the Oxford Playhouse.

Ryan Full’s show-stopping performance in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (pictured) perfectly reflected the joyful, irreverent approach taken to Geoffrey Chaucer’s classic stories in the witty adaptation by Phil Woods and Michael Bogdanov.

Five tales were lucidly told under director Jo Noble by a 36-strong company, six of whom also performed expertly on musical instruments. All were aged (as the group’s name suggests) from 16 to 22.

As might be guessed, the action built towards a comic climax with the famously smutty Miller’s Tale (set within a mile of where I write). The casting of Amanda Lalor as the randy student Nicholas was typical of the happy disregard throughout the show of the stage convention that boys play boys and girls girls.

Thus the two lads falling out over love for Zoe Gabriel’s lady Emily, in the courtly Knight’s Tale, were Rebecca Ingram and Max Webb, while Freddie Boath (a fine Miller too) supplied the hag-to-beauty heroine of The Wife of Bath’s Tale.

In The Reeve’s Tale, though, casting was more traditional, with James Lewis and Josh Parris as the two Cambridge students revenging themselves in various amusing ways on Jack Holloway’s grasping Miller (another one!).