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Classic Serial: François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel

Classic Serial: François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel: Episode 1: Gargantua

Drama

Drama: SciFi & Fantasy

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Episode 1

Episode 1: Gargantua

François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel

Gargantua

BBC Radio 4 - Classic Serial, François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gargantua

A young giant faces laughable insanity due to ignorance, crones and syphilitic professors.

A young giant faces laughable insanity due to paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors. Stars David Troughton.

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

Ep 2 - Pantagruel.

Concluding the bawdy and scatological adventures of Medieval giants. This episode concentrates on the story of Gargantua's son, Pantagruel and his morally dubious friend Panurge, as they go on a quest to discover whether marriage is for them. On the way they have many adventures before they come before the Seer of the Holy Bottle who gives them a definitive judgement.

Rabelais.....David Troughton
Gargantua....Robert Wilfort
Pantagruel....Justin Edwards
Panurge...Conrad Nelson
Friar Jean....Jonathan Keeble
Jacqueline/Seer...Fiona Clarke
Librarian/Secretary...Mark Chatterton

Producer Gary Brown

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'.

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Comedic moral stories by Rabelais that interweave the realistic with the fantastical

By François Rabelais. Comedic moral stories that interweave the realistic with the fantastical to expose human follies

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Classic Serial

François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel

Episode 1: Gargantua

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