The Merry Wives of Windsor (24 page)
Read The Merry Wives of Windsor Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
David Thacker’s 1992 production marked a return to the purely farcical approach of 1964. Once again, stylized costumes in “queasy shades of violet, green and pink”
86
stood out boldly against a cartoon set, here a cream-colored fantasy of curling staircases and paper-cut-out bridges, “an origamist’s delight,”
87
and the action seemed to many over-frenetic and desperate.
5.
David Thacker’s 1992 production: Ron Cook’s Dr. Caius was a “preening … black and yellow wasp … twirling in a flat spin of specious rage, his codpiece bulging, his goatee beard erect,” here pinioning Simple (Nick Holder) to the floor.
The critic Charles Spencer
88
complained that the production lacked the “world of carefully observed normality [necessary to provide] a solid base for the spiralling lunacy of the action,” while Michael Billington lamented that the production “forfeit[ed] the two things that make the play work: a concrete sense of reality and a predatory, desperate Falstaff.”
89
As that implied, the excellent but needle-thin Benjamin Whitrow proved miscast as Falstaff, unable to “camouflage his thin man’s nose, thin man’s cheeks and worse, thin man’s tenor voice and quick light movements”;
90
“redolent of the cathedral cloister,” he seemed “a minor Trollopian cleric”
91
or “game old scholarly vicar.”
92
The wives (Cheryl Campbell and Gemma Jones) won limited praise in difficult circumstances—“mettlesome heroines”
93
was typical. Anton Lesser’s hyperactive Ford, “a thin-lipped suburbanite within whom the obsessed Othello [was] turning somersaults of rage,”
94
was both loved and loathed. The one undisputed triumph was Ron Cook’s
Caius, a “preening … black and yellow wasp,”
95
“twirling in a flat spin of specious rage, his codpiece bulging and his goatee beard erect, selecting his rapiers from a yellow golf bag with no idea of their size or weight until they either [belied] their sheaths or [sent] him crashing to the floor.”
96
Ian Judge’s production in 1996 moved the play back from farce to comedy, with a Ford (Edward Petherbridge) whose escalating jealousy was sincere and painful to watch, only gradually building to the usual manic heights. Falstaff was also younger and lighter than usual, as in 1985. The production had an almost Chekhovian feel. Critics were uncertain how to react to this new approach, many complaining that the production was “not funny enough”
97
or lacked “the degree of physical delirium required.”
98
They took comfort in the traditionally farcical playing of the smaller roles—an excellent Caius and Slender stole the majority of the notices: “Guy Henry’s impulsive, dolorous, weightless, elongated Dr Caius is blissfully funny … Christopher Luscombe’s Slender is a paragon of embarrassed, apprehensive, high-bourgeois silliness.”
99
This was a Slender who flounced off
with
his new “wife” at the end. Shaun Usher was more analytic:
The latest version is quaint, pretty, intelligent and uncommonly sweet-natured for something dealing in so much brutal humiliation … It is gently amusing rather than hilarious … Perhaps there are too many styles of laughter-raising in the same place. At times, if not jarring, the mixture doesn’t gel. Merry is the word, really. What’s missing is true, anarchic intoxication.
100
In keeping with the comedic rather than farcical feel was a beautiful and naturalistic set by Tim Goodchild “that effortlessly change[d] from courtyard to house to pub,”
101
a “picturesque … treat … in limed-oak, complete with staircases and raised walkway, golden autumnal trees and a prospect of the Berkshire countryside and
Windsor Castle.”
102
The “agreeably exotic” costumes (Nightingale) were “an ingenious mixture of the Elizabethan and the Edwardian.”
103
Joanna Macallum as Meg Page with gardening apron and shears, “the very image of a comfortable, confident, suburban woman bent on getting as much innocent fun as she can,”
104
was well matched with “a smiley sparky Susannah York, enjoying herself and giving ‘the leer of invitation’ … as the well-off Mrs Ford.”
105
However, the “surprise casting stroke of the season and among the most marvellous” was “Leslie Phillips, that suave old comic smoothy with no Shakespearean experience”:
He has Falstaff’s irrepressible swagger of spirit, and also his private sense of defeat … he handles the language with such relish … rich impishness … [his] nonchalance … is cherishable. And the more he is dumped by the good folk of Windsor, the riper his delivery of the language grows … he has the life-enhancing essence of Falstaff because he catches the contradictions behind so many lines.
106
Rachel Kavanaugh, the only woman to direct
Merry Wives
for the RSC, “discovered an emotional charge in the play that eludes most directors,”
107
exploring both psychological depths and societal tensions, without sacrificing either the play’s humor or humanity, “a production … simply flawless in both conception and execution.”
108
The play was updated, with much loving period detail, to the immediate postwar years, “restor[ing] the recognizability which has been eroded by the passage of four centuries”
109
but also “most successfully” giving the plot “ballast” by
present[ing] the wives as women readjusting to a world in which the independence they briefly enjoyed during the war [had been] curtailed … The veneer of quiet suburban order [wore] thin as the women’s rebellious streak show[ed] itself and they demonstrate[d] that they like[d] and rel[ied] on each other rather more than … their husbands.
110
Even Anne, “a schoolgirl in uniform,” had “a mind of her own”;
111
the subtle closing image showed the newly married wife exiting arms linked with her mother and Mistress Ford, as her husband went ahead with Page.
However, Lucy Tregear and Claire Carrie were “as genuinely merry a pair of wives as I can remember.”
112
This successful balance was maintained throughout. The production was “a tremendously entertaining evening,”
113
and yet
at the same time … reache[d] into the dark heart of the play by refusing to treat Ford as a figure of fun, the stock character of ludicrously jealous husband … When Tom Mannion frenziedly search[ed] the laundry-basket at its second appearance and at last topple[d] into it himself this [was] the proper climax to his obsession, but hitherto his Ford [had] taken us towards the nastier follies of suspicion.
114
Kavanaugh also touched briefly on wider issues:
Chuk Iwuji’s American accent and flying jacket impl[ied] discreetly that Anne’s beloved Fenton [was] a Yank air ace stationed somewhere in the area. Iwuji’s casting [was] largely, but not entirely, colour-blind: in another astute touch, father Page’s deliberate line: “She is no match for you” [was] followed by an awkward silence as all realise[d] but none address[ed] the issue of race.
115
The casting was uniformly powerful. Richard Cordery was a “superbly mountainous Falstaff … with a fine relish for the sound of the words and a suggestion that they were being hauled up from some ruined treasury of a mind, as stuffed with language as his body [was] packed with fat.”
116
He found “depth in the role as well as great comedy … accept[ing] his punishment with rare grace and dignity. It [was] unexpectedly touching.”
117
John Gross concluded: “It’s a production that goes mainly for laughs, but which reminds us that the play is more than the made-to-order farce it is often assumed to be. There are constant humanising
touches, and a true Shakespearean warmth at the end”: “Intelligent and fun.”
118
Merry Wives, The Musical
In 1986 Sheridan Morley described
Merry Wives
as “a play in desperate need of maybe a full orchestra and fifteen full numbers as well”;
119
twenty years later the RSC obliged, with a Christmas production by Greg Doran. This was an adaptation that embraced Elizabethan dramaturgical principles in deliberately playing to the strengths of its cast and references to past successes: romantic love songs were incorporated for musical theater stars drafted in to play Anne and Fenton; Act 2 opened with a dance routine built around Simon Trinder’s comic Slender; the accompaniment of pots, pans, and washboards for the title number paid tribute to the similarly feminist musical sequence in Doran’s
Tamer Tamed;
Quickly’s masque disguise reminded audiences of Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning role as Elizabeth I. Most significantly, the role of Dench’s Mistress Quickly was enormously expanded, incorporating back-history and sizable extracts from
Henry IV Part II
, to give a more substantial relationship with Falstaff. Doran also built on a frequently cut aside from Pistol (2.2.120–22), together with his unexpected reappearance at the masque, and the marriage in
Henry V;
the combined rewrites, with some additions, give us a yearning Quickly finally propositioned by Falstaff but choosing instead to go off with a swaggering leather-clad punk-Goth Pistol “young enough to be her son and old enough to know better.”
120
This “brilliantly confident production”
121
was set firmly “in a musical fantasy-land,”
122
“where Fifties New Look meets olde worlde Jacobean.”
123
Paul Englishby’s score was equally eclectic, offering tributes to everyone from Verdi to Lloyd Webber, Elizabethan madrigals to Gilbert and Sullivan, even a show-stopping country and western hoedown.
Simon Callow as Falstaff was “glutton dressed as ram,”
124
“with billowing silver hair … a tum that seem[ed] to conceal a wheelbarrow, and a fruity gurgle of an accent”;
125
“Haydn Gwynne and Alexandra Gilbreath [made] eloquent, elegant wives,”
126
“manag[ing] that tricky double act of the truly touching and the randomly
comic”;
127
tall, gangling, mustachioed Alistair McGowan was “a Ford of Basil Fawlty fatuity and rages.”
128
There was especial praise for “Paul Chahidi as the ludicrous Frenchman … and Ian Hughes as the ludicrous Welshman … [both reveling] in producing the weirdest body language and most strangulated accents, making ‘fritters of English’ indeed,” adding: “The reconciliation jig between these two would-be duellists is perhaps the funniest example of some really top-drawer comic choreography from Michael Ashcroft.”
129
To others, Simon Trinder gave a “star performance as a fey, young yellow-bearded Slender: feckless, forlorn, artless, heart-catching, riveting in every movement, every utterance.”
130
However, it was Dench’s Mistress Quickly, combining comedy, pathos, determination, and self-deprecation, who, predictably, stole the show.
Bill Alexander
was born in Norfolk in 1948 and trained as a theater director at the Bristol Old Vic. His award-winning productions range from new plays to the classics. He joined the RSC as an assistant director in 1977 and became a resident director in 1980. His many RSC productions have included Howard Barker’s
The Hang of the Gaol
(1978) and
Country Dancing
(1986),
Tartuffe
and a play about its author Molière,
Richard III
(1984),
Volpone
(1984),
The Merry Wives of Windsor
(1985),
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1987),
The Merchant of Venice
(1988),
Twelfth Night
(1988), and
Cymbeline
(1988). From 1992 to 2000 Bill Alexander was artistic director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He also directed the perennially popular adaptation of Raymond Briggs’s
The Snowman
.
Rachel Kavanaugh
has been the artistic director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre since 2006 where her directorial credits have included
The Wizard of Oz
(2006),
Uncle Vanya
(2007),
Peter Pan: A Musical Adventure
(2007),
Hapgood
(2008),
His Dark Materials
(2009), and
Arthur and George
(2010). Her experience as a director
of Shakespeare is extensive, mostly at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, where she has helmed productions of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1997/8),
Twelfth Night
(1999),
Much Ado About Nothing
(2000),
Love’s Labour’s Lost
(2001),
As You Like It
(2002),
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
(2003),
Cymbeline
(2005), and
The Taming of the Shrew
(2006). She first worked for the RSC directing
Alice in Wonderland
over the 2001–02 winter season, returning a year later to work on the production of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
that she discusses here.