THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR: SHAKESPEARE GETS THE SUBURBAN SITCOM TREATMENT
One of the biggest laughs generated by Blanche McIntyre’s capable production of The Merry Wives of Windsor came about before the show had even opened. Much incredulity greeted the RSC’s content advisory warning that the play – an Elizabethan star-vehicle, as ‘twere, for the fat knight Sir John Falstaff – features “bullying in the form of body-shaming”.
Such a disclaimer looked like a reductio ad absurdum; the entire thrust of Shakespeare’s comedy is that there’s nothing sillier under the sun than a fat old fool who persuades himself he’s in with a chance with the ladies.
In Twelfth Night, with Malvolio, we get the leaner, more uptight version; in Merry Wives – often hailed as a forerunner of the suburban sitcom – we get an overweight, out of condition man about (Windsor) town, duped by the conspiring mistresses Page and Ford into thinking they’ll reciprocate his (epistolary) advances, only then to be wound up something rotten.
If there’s a deficiency, in fact, in this modern-dress mid-summer concession to our need for light entertainment, it’s that John Hodgkinson’s hulking knave could do with even more bulking up. Compared to the wheezing dimensions of Ian McKellen’s enormo-bellied creation in Player Kings on the West End, he’s positively trim. Still, this Falstaff is of sufficient girth and minimal self-awareness to interpose himself in doorways like a corporeal obstruction, forcing his female prey to squeeze past him.
There’s a knack to making him at once predatory and sympathetic. That balance is partly struck because there’s something essentially, twittishly agreeable about Hodgkinson – he has a lordly assurance that’s quite middle-managerial, a man with a plan, and no clue. And it’s not like he’s truly allowed his randy moment, the coitus is no sooner attempted than interrupted. Verbally, he lends relish and heft to his speeches. Physically, he’s a scream – diving head-first into a wash-basket at the approach of the zealously jealous Ford (Richard Goulding), reemerging from his consequent dunking utterly begrimed and futilely applying deodorant; later he dolls up to the tottering, grotesque maximum to make his frantic escape for a second time as the “fat woman of Brentford”.
Besides, as soon as you clap eyes on them you know he has met his match in the laughing wiliness and capering wit of Samantha Spiro and Siubhan Harrison as Ford and Page, a formidable, winking female double-act.
There’s a fittingly cartoonish, flimsy aspect to the Middle England mise en scène with its visual puns (Pie Sports), mock-Tudor constructions, and ornamental pigeons. But in that two-dimensionality lies a satirical sting of sorts. McIntyre understands that Shakespeare had in his sights the great panoply of perennially inadequate blokedom. And besides Goulding’s obsessive mania as the cuckold-phobic Ford, there’s a show-stealing turn from Patrick Walshe McBride as the dim and bashful Slender, with Ian Hughes the volubly peculiar Welsh parson and Jason Thorpe’s Dr Caius dispensing mouthwash in an enjoyably anomalous dentists’ parlour. Recommended, up to a (‘tis swiftly forgettable) point.
Until Sept 7. Tickets: 01789 331111; rsc.org.uk
2024-06-13T13:11:54Z dg43tfdfdgfd