Even the most hardcore Bardolator would have to acknowledge that in a hierarchy of Shakespeare’s works, The Merry Wives of Windsor comes fairly low, being a hokey ass, canonically illogical spin off from the Henry IV plays. Essentially it offered the beloved character of Sir John Falstaff a brand new adventure, but one that lacked the pathos and grit of his original appearances, and also sidesteps the fact that he'd died some 200 years before the manifestly ‘present day’-set Merry Wives.
It’s pretty funny, though, which is why it remains more performed than some of the Bard’s sloggier rarities – this is the second time it’s been staged during Michelle Terry’s tenure in charge of the Globe. And frankly it’s like a red rag to a bull for Globe deputy Sean Holmes, whose keen sense of the ironic and the ersatz has repeatedly drawn him to Shakespeare’s dafter comedies over and above the serious stuff.
And it doesn’t get dafter than Merry Wives, a flawed play Holmes has done precious little to ‘fix’. Indeed, one might argue that his production actually aggressively takes the piss out of it. On a patterned Grace Smart set that looks like Cath Kidson having a meltdown, a series of glorious eccentrics deliver their lines in wilfully stilted fashion, frequently blaring out particularly prosperous individual phrases in a way that is entirely predicated on getting a laugh at Shakespeare’s expense. Lines like ‘You Banbury cheese!’ bring the house down.
As Falstaff, Globe mainstay George Fouracres continues his mission to play every major Shakespeare character before the age of 40. Wearing a fat suit and silver streaked wig, he plays the old knight as a sort of satyr-like, semi mystical being, whose age and generally shambolic nature are belied by him having the vigour and athleticism of a man.. well, George Fouracres’s age.
The plot (such as it is) sees a skint Falstaff attempt to woo sundry married noblewomen around the town of Windsor in the hope there’s some money in it for him.
Holmes’s earnest intervention is to show a genuine romance developing between the increasingly bedraggled Falstaff and Katherine Pearce’s bluff Mistress Ford, who clearly isn’t stringing him along for her own amusement.
Beyond that it’s pathologically silly, a relentless barrage of absurdist line deliveries and outlandish character interpretations: my favourite was Adam Wadsworth in the dual roles of the savant-like Slender and extremely French Doctor Caius, though kudos to Danielle Philips for wrangling a lot of laughs out of the unpromising character of Robin the Page.
In essence Holmes’s approach maximises laughs but takes little care to try and prod, poke and flatter Shakespeare’s daft plot into any real semblance of coherency. Smart’s design is a delight aesthetically, but having most of the characters wearing the same green print clothes as each other doesn’t exactly help you remember who everyone is supposed to be, especially early on.
But again: it’s not a great play, and rather than bend over backwards to try and make it look like it might be one, Holmes has opted to have fun. And so long as you’re not expecting too much from this flimsiest of works, you’ll have fun too.
