Peter Viney's Blog

The Merry Wives of Windsor
by William Shakespeare

Directed by Elle While
Composer Frank Moon

Shakespeare’s Globe
London

Friday 21st June 2019, 14.00

CAST:
I can’t be doing with The Globe’s style of mixing cast, creatives and the people renting out cushions with equal billing mixed up in the cast list. This time they’ve even mixed William Shakespeare in there for the online cast and creatives list. I  personally think his creative role was greater than that of the “Accent coach.” So I’ve ordered them my way.

Pearce Quigley- Sir John Falstaff
Sarah Finigan – Mistress Page
Bryony Hannah- Mistress Ford
Forbes Masson – George Page
Jude Owusu – Frank Ford
Boadicea Ricketts- Anne Page / John Rugby
Joshua Lacey – Abraham Slender / Robin
Dickon Tyrell- Robert Shallow
Anita Reynolds- Mistress Quickly
Richard Katz – Doctor Caius / Pistol
Hedydd Dylan – Sir Hugh Evans
Zach Wyatt – Fenton / Bardolph

Pre-show music: The stage for Merry Wives of Windsor

An afternoon at The Globe is (almost always) enjoyable whatever the weather. It’s also good to review. Those 700 tickets for £5 at every show ads mean what they say: if you want to see it, you will be able to get in. That’s why Globe reviews get more hits than any other theatre.

There’s a degree of trepidation on this one. Elle While was the alleged “director” of the director-less Globe Ensemble As You Like It, last year, the worst production I’ve seen at The Globe. After not missing a Shakespeare at The Globe in years, we’ve skipped all three “Globe ensemble” gender-blind history plays this year. We couldn’t face more “Globe Ensemble” with a female Hotspur and Falstaff.  We had a long discussion about whether to renew our Friends membership this year, and know others who didn’t. In the end, the discount at the wonderful The Swan restaurant held the balance … it’s good for other South Bank theatres too … The Menier, Old Vic, Young Vic, Bridge, National. This season they have nine Shakespeare plays (including the three stripped down touring productions) plus one Ben Jonson. They are returning to the “Shakespeare’s Globe” name with a vengeance then. No modern material: Boudica or Nell Gwynn, Eyam or Tristan and Yseult. It’s also true that for many of the audience on their only ever visit to London that the popular classic Shakespeare (i.e. mainly comedy) will be just what they want. We sat near Americans and they were thrilled and laughed throughout.  The Globe proudly proclaims that As You Like It, is returning from 2018 after critical acclaim. What critical acclaim? I might ask. They are doing new versions of Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night pretty fast after Emma Rice’s productions, but there is a fair argument that they could do a new version every year of these two. Perhaps that is a return to the original concept of The Globe, where the company generally revived plays frequently, though if they are aiming at tourism plus the historical experience, then Elizabethan / Jacobean costume would be the best idea. Anyway, Merry Wives of Windsor was overdue revisiting in their programme.

Phew! Here, Falstaff is played by Pearce Quigley – a much better idea for Henry IV too with its female Falstaff. At least mainly, the men appear to be played by men, apart from the Welsh schoolmaster, who could easily have been made a Welsh schoolmistress with a change of name, but no. A woman is listed as “Sir Hugh.” The intrinsic roles have defeated even The Globe’s tinkering with gender.

Faces in the crowd., Ten minutes before the show started. Pearce Quigley as Falstaff with Bardolph and Pistol.

They had a pre-show. Actors were wandering about among the crowd and three of he band playing in the pits. I like that.

It’s a great fun experience, though it’s neither a great nor even very good version of the intrinsic play. The RSC did this one so well in 2012 and then even better in 2018 that it’s against heavy competition. We felt a hangover from those Director-less Globe Ensemble productions as most of the cast did very funny star turns, but the whole failed to mesh smoothly. Frantic movement and dashing about was the order of the day. Sometimes a director needs to say, ‘brilliant stuff, but it detracts from the balance of the whole.’

So, while we liked both Mistress Ford and Mistress Page very much, we didn’t see nearly enough of them, so that Mistress Quickly came across as a bigger part, and also her strong Jamaican accent left us uncomprehending at times. We got to the point where we were wondering where the merry wives were. Did they lose a lot of lines? Or was there just less focus on them? They are the wives of the title. Sarah Finigan and Bryony Hannah are a well-matched pair too. We really liked their performances. I went online searching for images of the two together. That’s normally one of the first images theatres would use. Not here.

Master Page (Forbes Masson) and Mistress Page (Sarah Finigan)

We missed their plotting and cameradie which seemed shortened, When they revealed what had been going on with Falstaff to their husbands, it was done as a mime show. A very good idea given the large space of The Globe and an audience by now warmed up for frantic comedy. We wanted more of them! After all, this is the play with ordinary non-aristocratic or mythical women at the fore.

Jude Owesu as Master Ford

Equally, Jude Owesu’s Master Ford seemed reduced, and remember that for years this, not Falstaff, was the most coveted role for the actor managers. His disguise as Master Brooks involved a hat with dreadlocks and another (thankfully lighter) Caribbean shift of accent. His playing with the word ‘cuckold’ was memorable, but we thought that Tamburlaine, as last year at the RSC rather than comedy was his forte.

Pearce Quigley as Falstaff, Bryony Hannah as Mistress Ford

Pearce Quigley is an actor where you might say ‘we’ll have Pearce Quigley for this’ rather than ‘Could Pearce Quigley do this?’ He has his style. It’s very funny. He doesn’t vary it. Lugubrious Lancastrian, or Melancholy Mancunian. That’s not a criticism, you could say Frankie Howard and Tony Hancock did just the same in staying within a perceived character they had created. He’s almost a combination of Howard’s slightly camp delivery with Hancock’s misery, just add the accent. Putting this character onto Falstaff is radical. It worked. His ability to ad-lib is central- any Shakespeare comic part surely ad-libbed. It goes down very well at The Globe. He explained that a pinnace was a small boat. He asked for a quart of sack – and two paracetamol. He took mention of a doe into Julie Andrews territory. He exclaimed dolefully, ‘I am here, you know’ at the end when everyone was discussing him. He was a sad Falstaff, milking audience sympathy. However the priapic bit was mainly confined to phallic gestures. You didn’t get the impression that this Falstaff really saw himself as a stud.  He had tremendous business though-  being led blindfold into the audience stood out.

Anita Reynolds as Mistress Quickly

Once you had made Mistress Quickly and the disguised Master Brooks Jamaican, Dr Caius French,  Sir Hugh Welsh, Falstaff Mancunian, and Master Page Scots, plus Fenton as American, then the wives Estuary-lite, there were too many competing strong accents. Fenton’s sharp suit and hat worked well as 1930s American however.

The sub-plot around Anne page involves her dad’s preference for the drippy Slender as a husband, while her mum prefers Dr Caius. Anne prefers her own choice Fenton- one of the ‘modern’ for 1597 attitudes Shakespeare put in the play. She has her choice and it prevails over family. Boadicea Ricketts was a lively Anne Page who shone.

Dickon Tyrell as Justice Shallow, Joshua Lacey as Slender

One reviewer felt Dr Caius veered into Allo Allo territory. He would. He is the template. That’s how you do it. Shakespeare knew that French accents and Welsh accents were funny to an English audience. It worked a dream this afternoon just as it did in 1597 or 1598. Richard Katz joined the line of actors who carry off the funny Frenchman with aplomb. The replacement of ‘third’  with ‘turd’ always gets a huge laugh as if it were an inspired ad-lib. It is the original text. He added one for me. In the text, Caius exclaims ‘by gar’ frequently (by God). Here it got closer and closer to ‘bugger!’ And when appropriate to the text, ‘Bugger me!’ I liked the Welsh parson getting a mournful song in Welsh. She did the role well, and I suppose the sword fight precludes making the parson visibly female. The presence of French and Welsh funny accents places the play between Henry IV part two and Henry V, though the funny French in the latter was the princess, Katherine of France. Still, if they had a specialist for French (they certainly had a Welsh comedian) Elizabethans thought of the French as effete so it could have been the same boy player.

The three times that Falstaff gets his comeuppance when tricked by the wives are the central pillars of the play. In the first he has to hide from the jealous Master Ford in a laundry basket. This was so funny because of the silent struggles of the servants trying to lift it and roll it down the steps and out of the building to drop into The Thames, a less inviting stretch of river at Southwark than at Windsor and what was floating in it would have been worse then. Was Falstaff in the basket throughout, or did he escape through a trap? We concluded that either he was in there – huge praise for him, or if he had left, huge praise for seamless stage management.

In the second part, we see him after his dip in the river. Maybe the biggest laugh in he play was pouring water from his shoe, then his second escape is dressed as a woman, the Witch of Brentford. That was OK, but I have seen funnier attempts at Falstaff in drag by improvising stage stuff as costume at speed. In this scene, the pursuing men’s bright plus fours were a very good costume design move. Costume was good throughout.

Falstaff as Herne The Hunter

The third trial of Falstaff sees him dressed as Herne the Hunter at midnight surrounded and attacked by everyone else dressed as fairies. This was the big production number of the play with elaborate costume all round and stage decorations . It leads into the final dance and the choreography was as throughout, outstandingly good. Boadicea Ricketts had been a sparky Anne Page and you could see that she and her chosen partner Zach Wyatt as Fenton were the on-stage dance captains. As usual, the final dance at The Globe is so good that all is forgiven and you leave with a warm glow.

Boadicea Ricketts as Anne Page and Zach Wyatt as Fenton

THE PROGRAMME

The programme has an interesting essay by Elizabeth Schafer on the ‘fake news’ story that this play was commissioned by Elizabeth I to show Falstaff in love, and that it was written in two weeks. I agree that the play is too well-crafted for that. The other background thing about the play is the sly references to Shakespeare’s Stratford childhood in Justice Shallow and the Welsh schoolmaster. That would be a good essay – Sydney Greenblat covers it in Will of The World, pointing out how many references are like little obscene jottings in a Stratford schoolboy’s notebook.

Instead we got a bizarre essay by Heather Neill on the 1930s setting and the Jarrow Marches, linking up to austerity and food banks in 2019. While that might be of interest in general,  it has absolutely zero to do with the production, except that they had a man with placards about seeking work wandering about before the play started. It might be the producers’ world view but it is not reflected in any way in the production. Use of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ to describe the great innovation of the play as mentioned in the Fake News essay – portraying the new rising middle class of England rather than 15th century English dukes or Italian lords and ladies- shows the writer’s political bias.

You might just as well argue that Dr Caius shows either (a) the under-investment in the National Health Service that requires us to import French doctors, or conversely (b) the Brexiteer’s view that lots of foreigners are over here taking our jobs.

Or like Shakespeare just admit that ‘French’ had an immediate collocation with sexual diseases in 16th century London, so ‘French doctor’ would have had that reflection.

I like a programme with lots to read in it, so it scores on that, but the 1930s essay is from something unconnected to the play, or Shakespeare. I felt I’d wandered into someone’s rant.

The company

Overall, I’ll go with the consensus. Three star.

***

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

3 star
Claire Allfree, Telegraph ***
Chris Bennion, The Times ***
Alun Hood, What’s On Stage ***
Alice Saville, Time Out, ***
Laura Jones, Broadway World ***

2 star
Kate Wyver, The Guardian **
Fiona Moutford, The Standard **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
The Merry Wives of Windsor – RSC 2012
The Merry Wives, Northern Broadsides 2016
The Merry Wives of Windsor – RSC 2018
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
The Merry Wives of Windsor – RSC 2024
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2025

ELLE WHILE
As You Like It, Globe 2018

PEARCE QUIGLEY
As You Like It, Globe 2018
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Globe 2013
The Changeling Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015
The Beaux Stratagem, National Theatre, 2015

FORBES MASSON
Boudica, Globe 2017
Travesties, Menier, 2016
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bath 2016
The Ruling Class, Trafalgar Studio, 2015
Richard III, Trafalgar Studio, 2014
Macbeth, Trafalgar Studio, 2013

JUDE OWUSU
Tamburlaine, RSC 2018
Julius Caesar, RSC 2012

JOSHUA LACEY
Macbeth, National Theatre, 2018
Imogen (Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed) – Globe 2016
wonder.land by Damian Albarn, Moira Buffini, National Theatre 2016
Richard III – Trafalgar Studios, 2014
Twelfth Night, Globe 2017(Orsino)

RICHARD KATZ
As You Like It, Globe 2018

ANITA REYNOLDS
Absolute Hell, National Theatre 2018

DICKON TYRELL
Measure For Measure, Globe 2015
Knight of The Burning Pestle, Wanamaker, 2014
Duchess of Malfi, Wanamaker, 2014