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.
A sunny, Sunday afternoon in the globe, filled to the rafters, and with only the planes and helicopters passing overhead to remind you of the 21st century; made this play a delight from start to finish. Christopher Benjamin was born to play the fat knight, and gave us a Falstaff, who for all his faults, everybody loved. The cast was great; and Andrew Havill’s (Basil Faulty) interpretation of Master Ford deserves and award. This play is wall to wall laughter; and isn’t that just what Shakespeare meant it to be?
i usually adore productios at the globe, and loved christopher luscombe's midsummer night's dream at regent's park last year. But this year he seems to be trying too hard. The play seems contrived and the some of the acting far too obvious.
However, I loved Christopher Benjamin's fully slefr-obsessed Falstaff (though some seeminly simple laughs were missed), and Sarah Woodward's fine Mistress Ford.
However, the hammy acting of william belchambers as a stumbling unsure Slender, and Phillip Bird's Caius were thoroughly grotesque.
I only hope the play improves during its lenghty run.
i thought this production was terrible..they were obviously going for gags - some forced onto shakespeare's script. The acting was over the top, and i felt some of the actors were grasping at bad characterisation - slender and falstaff seemed to let many good textual refernces slide. A disappointment.
3 comments
A sunny, Sunday afternoon in the globe, filled to the rafters, and with only the planes and helicopters passing overhead to remind you of the 21st century; made this play a delight from start to finish. Christopher Benjamin was born to play the fat knight, and gave us a Falstaff, who for all his faults, everybody loved. The cast was great; and Andrew Havill’s (Basil Faulty) interpretation of Master Ford deserves and award. This play is wall to wall laughter; and isn’t that just what Shakespeare meant it to be?
i usually adore productios at the globe, and loved christopher luscombe's midsummer night's dream at regent's park last year. But this year he seems to be trying too hard. The play seems contrived and the some of the acting far too obvious.
However, I loved Christopher Benjamin's fully slefr-obsessed Falstaff (though some seeminly simple laughs were missed), and Sarah Woodward's fine Mistress Ford.
However, the hammy acting of william belchambers as a stumbling unsure Slender, and Phillip Bird's Caius were thoroughly grotesque.
I only hope the play improves during its lenghty run.
i thought this production was terrible..they were obviously going for gags - some forced onto shakespeare's script. The acting was over the top, and i felt some of the actors were grasping at bad characterisation - slender and falstaff seemed to let many good textual refernces slide. A disappointment.