A couple of years ago, director Christopher Luscombe and designer Janet Bird gave us a ‘Comedy of Errors’ at the Globe that was full of the spirit of ‘Carry On’. Now they’ve pulled a similar trick with this rarely performed Falstaff vehicle. Luscombe takes the usual objection to the play – that it’s nothing more than a bourgeois sit-com – and makes that its great virtue. Here, after all, are all the great archetypes of twentieth-century British televisual humour: the paranoid husband, the conniving housewife, the effete suitor.
Luscombe even encourages some of his cast to colour their performances with nods to various TV favourites. So, Andrew Havill’s Ford, manically searching his house for the fat knight, whom he rightly suspects of being after his wife Alice (Sarah Woodward), is Basil Fawlty in tights, with a touch of Rob Brydon. Serena Evans’s Meg Page, the other merry wife of the title, has all the mischief of Miranda Richardson in ‘Blackadder’. And the housekeeper Mistress Quickly, as played by Sue Wallace, bustles about like an Elizabethan Hyacinth Bucket.
Thankfully, none of this is overdone (no one says, ‘Am I bovvered?’) but the allusions are still strong enough to really make you feel that you are on the end of a thread of laughter running unbroken through 500 years of British theatre. The flaw of the play, for modern eyes, is that Falstaff – a blithely, loveably bumptious Christopher Benjamin – is not taken back into the fold after his ritual humiliation. No matter. With a delightful set, and spot-on musical accompaniment, this is a quite, quite lovely show.
