Brightly colourful and industriously daft
The Merry Wives of Windsor
RSC, Stratford-upon-avon
The timing of this revival is well-judged. A month or so’s run for Shakespeare’s comedy on the main stage at Stratford at the end of summer cushions the blow of the dread return to work or school. A stint at the Barbican over Christmas means that Fiona Laird’s brightly colourful and industriously daft production should meet with just the right level of indulgent good spirits. Any other times of the year, I’d fear for its fortunes.
Pepys hated Merry Wives. It didn’t please him at all, “in no part of it”, he griped in August 1667. While you’d need to be spectacularly grumpy to remain unmoved to laughter during the whole two-and-a-half-hours here, there’s no escaping the fact that the play is not up there with the Bard’s best. An overt “spin-off ” vehicle for Sir John Falstaff, it was possibly rustled up at Elizabeth I’s behest – an assumption made explicit here in a prologue that has the queen demanding that WS deliver a script within a fortnight.
That prologue actually stretches to a full five minutes or so of set-up business, with an elaborate dumb-show introducing the dramatis personae in turn, plus a dance. If the comedy’s primary characteristic is that it flogs a joke to death – showing Sir John humiliated not once, not twice but thrice by the “merry wives” Mistresses Page and Ford whose sexual favours (and fat purses) he vainly aspires to avail himself of – Laird’s approach is to flog with particular gusto. With the input of Toby Park (of Spymonkey) as “physical comedy” director, there’s barely a gag-free minute, and each part has been invested with a larger-thanlife set of defining mannerisms.
Placing the action in the suburbs, Shakespeare broke new ground in satirising the middle-classes, and Merry Wives is often cited as a proto-sitcom. Yet sitcoms tend to amplify social nuances and domestic niggles. The ebullient level of attack here more suggests old-school buffoonery let loose amid a cartoon modern England: mock-tudor housing, Elizabethan costume stylings, lashings of bling and dashes of The Only Way is Essex attitude. It looks more like a pre-figuring of Harry Enfield and Chums, and indeed Tom Padley’s Slender resembles a close relation of Enfield’s Tim-nice-but-dim.
Which isn’t to say he isn’t funny. Or that the others aren’t. Laird has assembled a superb cast – headed by David Troughton, whose Falstaff, barrel-bellied (courtesy of a fat-suit) and distractingly priapic (a codpiece pushes with vulgar force through his doublet-and-hose), is a start-to-finish delight. But do we feel for him at his climactic humiliation? Some of the pathos goes missing amid the pratfalls.
Perhaps if it tried less hard, it’d be more enjoyable still. Do we need David Acton’s Welsh Parson to start a Bread of Heaven singalong? Then again, to quote another Shakespeare text: “Reason not the need.” It does the trick.