The Merry Wives of Windsor (25 page)

The Merry Wives of Windsor
has been called Shakespeare’s most middle class and suburban play. Do you agree, and did the design of your production reflect this?

BA:
It is his most middle class and suburban play. The only other play that I can think of that has such an absence of the upper and aristocratic and ruling class is the
Shrew
. Falstaff is of course arguably an aristocrat fallen amongst shopkeepers, which situation provides the meat of the humor. However the provenance of his knighthood remains obscure. We take from the
Henry IV
plays a sense of his exclusion from courtly life, although no element in the plot specifically links him to those events. Is the story somehow meant to take place after the end of
Part II
and before his death in
Henry
V
? Or perhaps before the sagas, or somewhere in the middle? We don’t know and actually don’t care. The play is self-contained and floats in some parallel universe. This was one of the reasons I felt happy relocating the play in history (which I did not do with the
Henry IV
s), looking for the trans-historical meanings without the burden of actual historical events impinging.

It seemed to me that in social history the spirit of a new Elizabethan age in England following the coronation of the young queen in the mid-1950s was a perfect reflection of the stress and strain caused by class mobility at the time of the first Elizabeth; especially in the mid-1590s when
Merry Wives
was written. The aristocracy was becoming impoverished and turning to trade for finance and the emerging wealthy middle class for marriage. Really it wasn’t such a mad idea of Malvolio’s that he could dream of the hand of the Lady
Olivia. After all, consider the situation in
The Duchess of Malfi
. One of the really funny ideas in the play is how panic-stricken Page is at the idea of his daughter, Anne, marrying the feckless Fenton, who is undoubtedly her social superior. A couple of generations earlier he would have been delighted. The world of a fallen Falstaff came together in my mind with the world of the hero of
I’m Alright Jack
. Falstaff misunderstands his time. He believes his breeding gives him automatic access to the beds of the bourgeoisie. He reckons without their newfound self-confidence and pride, their moral strength built on financial security. At the start of the production television aerials slowly emerged from the roofs of the faux-Tudor houses of Windsor.

RK:
I understand what you mean by the question, but I resist it because “middle class” and “suburban” have a slight pejorative sense about them, especially the word “suburban,” which suggests that in some way it’s a lesser play. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays which are almost entirely concerned with people who aren’t of rank, some of whom have money and others who want money. They are people who are very conscious of their place in society, but apart from Falstaff they are not lords, ladies, or gentlemen. We are not dealing with kings and queens so I agree in the general sense of the question, but I resist it because I think it risks putting the play into a box of being not a great play. The production played in the Swan, went on a regional tour, and then went into the Old Vic. The design did reflect it insomuch as a design for a regional tour in a mobile theater can, because it was essentially the same design for each theater. The design was incredibly simple and was basically a continuation of the Swan, but the costumes were very English 1940s and so quite conservative for that group of people. They were very particular, very specific because I wanted to make a real world that the audience could recognize.

Do you see this as a play in which the women come out on top in every respect? Mistresses Page and Ford are certainly a very rewarding pair of roles
.

BA:
The women think Falstaff is just absolutely ridiculous, a complete and utter joke. It’s really quite easy for them to come out on top
given the depth of the fat knight’s self-delusion. They never have a moment’s doubt about what he deserves and how to deliver that humiliation. It is the fact that they are not in any way conflicted or tempted by the situation that allows the play to be a simple farce rather than a darkly tortured comedy like, say,
Troilus and Cressida
or
All’s Well
. And they certainly are rewarding parts, as Lindsay Duncan and Janet Dale proved.

RK:
I think that is the case, yes. They come out on top in terms of the fact that they put a plan into action and the plan succeeds. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are the driving brains behind the play, they are the cleverest people in the play, and together they are more than the sum of their parts. What’s brilliant is that the two of them together are an unstoppable force. They combat with Falstaff for our affection, but in terms of the mechanism of the play and the plot and intelligence within the play they absolutely come out on top. Even Anne Page gets what she wants in the end.

Does it matter that Shakespeare’s original audience would already have met Falstaff, Justice Shallow, and others in
Henry IV
,
but that many members of a modern audience will not have done so?

BA:
No. See answer to question one. The play is completely standalone from the
Henry
s. Some would say that Falstaff and the others are not even really the same characters. Or you could say that he is just a pale shadow. In some ways it’s a bit of a mystery why he wrote it. Elizabeth demanding a play about Falstaff in love is possible I suppose, but then she must have missed the point about his relationship to Hal in
Henry IV Part I
. I think he wanted to experiment with pure farce along the lines of
The Comedy of Errors
but in a contemporary English situation. I suppose it’s his most Jonsonian play in that respect.

RK:
No, I don’t think it matters at all. I think it’s my responsibility as a director to make sure that the characters are understandable and that you don’t need to have seen
Henry IV
in order to enjoy the play. There are layers of resonance that you get if you have seen those other plays, but I don’t think it matters at all if you don’t know them.

Tell us what you and your Falstaff found through your exploration of the character and the language of the fat knight
.

BA:
The language of Falstaff is rich and garrulous but without the edge, wit, and irony of the character in
Henry IV
. So Peter Jeffries and I worked on the idea of the pub bore, the soaked anecdote-spewer with a touch of Terry Thomas to provide grit and a whiff of danger.

RK:
He is a man whose language is like his appetite in that it’s varied, fulsome, excessive, beautiful, and gross. He is a kind of mighty contradiction, in that he is both incredibly attractive and repulsive, and we love him although what he is doing is outrageous. We went through a lot of versions of the end of the play in terms of how Falstaff was left, and we realized in the end that we didn’t need to try to make the audience love him or feel sorry for him because they already did all that. If you embrace the language with which he speaks, both to us and also the other characters, that is in itself so delicious that we are incredibly attracted to him as a theatrical character.

Does it make a difference that this is almost entirely a prose play, in which you don’t have to spend time working with actors on the notorious iambic pentameter?

BA:
Well, no, it doesn’t matter; it just gives you more time to explore other things—like how to get the laughs. Nicky Henson spent far more time practicing how to somersault over the sofa than refining his speech rhythms.

RK:
It doesn’t mean that the language is any easier; in fact in many cases it means it’s more complicated. The prose is constructed antithetically just as a lot of Shakespeare’s verse is and so it requires as much careful attention as verse does.

In practical terms, how do you deal with the sheer bulk and weight of Falstaff in the laundry basket?

BA:
You send the guys who have to carry it down to the gym every day.

RK:
We cast two very, very strong people as John and Robert! Because it was in the Swan and then touring he had to get in the basket and they had to carry him off, we couldn’t have trapdoors or anything so, seriously, we had to get actors who were able to do that.

6.
Rachel Kavanaugh’s 2002 RSC touring production with Richard Cordery as Falstaff and Claire Carrie as Mistress Ford.

Shakespeare often focuses on the destructive power of jealousy within his plays—given that
Merry Wives
is a comedy, how seriously did you take Ford’s jealousy?

BA:
A very good question. You have to take it very seriously for the comedy to work. His jealousy is the absolute center of the plot mechanism. If the audience don’t believe in it they won’t believe in the story and so won’t find it funny. The essence of a sexually jealous man is that everything he sees seems to confirm his suspicions. Hence, at one point when Nicky was tearing the house apart looking for Falstaff he ripped down the curtains to find the Tory election slogan “You’ve never had it so good” staring him in the face. (The Fords and the Pages were obviously Tory voters, by the way.) Ford is quite literally being driven mad by jealousy, just like Leontes and Othello and Troilus and Posthumus. Us knowing that he has no cause allows
us to laugh in a farce-structured play. In a tragically structured play like
Othello
it makes us weep.

7.
Bill Alexander’s 1985 RSC production. Ford’s jealousy was “the absolute center of the plot mechanism,” with Nicky Henson as Ford, Janet Dale as Mistress Page, Lindsay Duncan as Mistress Ford, David Bradley as Dr. Caius, Bruce Alexander as Hugh Evans, Paul Webster as Page.

RK:
We played it completely seriously, because for Ford that jealousy is no less than that experienced by Othello or Leontes. He is a married man just as they are, experiencing the same emotions. The context through which the audience views that may be different, but for the actor playing that role the experience is identical. Unlike
Othello
it has a happy resolution, but the experience is as intense so I think you have to take it just as seriously.

The play very much fosters stereotypes—Caius the French doctor, Sir Hugh the Welsh parson—did you adhere to these stereotypes or act against them?

BA:
I made Caius a psychiatrist to stand in starker contrast to Hugh the priest. Whether this increased or diminished them as stereotypes I don’t know, but it made the bitterness of their rivalry spicier. It was something the 1950s setting made possible and sharpened the humor.

RK:
It’s impossible to totally act against them because of the way those two particular characters are written and their very extreme modes of speech, but I didn’t view them as stereotypes. I viewed them as extreme personalities who happened to be French and Welsh. I can’t speak for how Shakespeare’s audience would have viewed all French people or all Welsh people, but certainly within the context of our production and with a modern audience what we had was an extremely eccentric French doctor and an almost equally eccentric Welsh pastor. But it’s not the fact that they are French and Welsh that makes them eccentric, it’s the fact that they are particularly eccentric people who happen to be of those nationalities, and both of them, like Falstaff, enjoy speaking in their own particular way.

How did you stage the difficult “fairy scene” at the end of the play?

BA:
It was pretty much all Halloween, trick or treat, headless men and zombies kind of stuff, with Sheila Steafel as the Hostess staggering
around completely drunk in a full fairy outfit complete with wilting wand. Herne’s Oak had been reduced to a huge stump with a notice proclaiming that The Ministry of Works had deemed it in breach of Health and Safety regulations.