Theatre
Make merry
Peter Jenkins
The Merry Wives of Windsor (RSC, Stratford-on-Avon) It was disappointing to arrive in Stratford for the new Shakespeare season to find the performance of Pericles cancelled due to illness because The Merry Wives of Windsor is scarcely worth so inconvenient a journey. I wonder whether it even deserves the attentions of a company as talented as the RSC or a director as eminent as Trevor Nunn. It is an inferior work and mostly a bore. Jam sorry for those who are taken to it in the mistaken belief that because Falstaff hides in a dirty linen basket the play is unusually accessible and makes an easy introduction to Shakespeare; it would be more likely to put people off for life. The good plays are the most easily enjoyable and there is little point in playing Shakespeare for Shakespeare's sake unless a director has some miracle he thinks he can work on the bad ones, as Nunn did for example with his musical version of The Comedy of Errors.
Falstaff here is a crude version, if not exactly a pale shadow, of his former tragicomic self in Henry /V His prose is devoid, as indeed is almost the whole play, of poetry and only a few robust lines remind us of the original. The problem in playing the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is how much to read into the character from his earlier and superior dramatic incarnations. Liberties are invited by the fact that Shakespeare regarded him as sufficiently well-known to have a. death scene in absentio in Henry V and very touching it is too. The trouble in The Merry Wives is that the general poor quality and triviality of the piece makes it difficult to portray Falstaff as a giant of an Englishman (not just one fat one) and at the same time a most disreputable and wicked fellow. There used to be a popular Saturday-afternoon wrestler who was billed as 'the man you love to hate' and who had the air of a gentleman and a sport although he played most shockingly foul. Flastaff has to have this kind of ambivalent fascination. His saving tragic quality is that he is a gentleman, however fallen in his state. This is much harder to convey in The Merry Wives than in the histories for we do not see him in the company of kings or princely layabouts. The chief strength of John Woodvine's performance is that he never forgets the gentleman in Falstaff or reduces him to the level of a public bar buffoon burping up the roast beef of olde England. His voice, one of the most distinctive in the theatre today, has an officerlike quality about it and his Falstaff reminded me of those derelict old majors, retired or maybe cashiered, whom one sees at the races, down on their luck but not on their dignity — still expecting to be called 'sir' on the rails.
Woodvine puts proper emphasis on such proudly pathetic lines as 'if it should come to the ear of the court how I have been transformed' and the sadly resigned 'Falstaff will learn the humour of the age' but it is difficult to give the character his tragic dimension when he is being made such a base fool of in such a low comedy. There is no actor who speaks Shakespeare with greater clarity and all of the good lines — there are few enough of them — came over well. My favourite is his response to being offered an egg in his sack: 'Simple of itself; I'll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.' This is the exact equivalent of the man in the New Yorker cartoon who, brought an olive in his martini, retorts that he had not ordered a fruit salad.
For all the virtues of Woodvine's performance I couldn't muster any strong feelings about his Falstaff and nor therefore enter into the spirit of reconciliation with which Shakespeare ends the play and which Nunn underscores with another of his 'alltogether-now, with-a-hey-nonny-no' finales. Nor did I like Falstaff s final gesture — and Woodvine's only sentimental lapse — when he scoops up his sleeping page boy in what are, after all, affectionate arms and clasps him to what is, after all, a warmhearted, if obese, bosom. It would have been more in order to have aimed a last and unrepentant kick at the innocent child, W.C. Fields-like.
The laundry basket scene is, of course, a perfect piece of farce which leaves a vivid memory long after the tedium of the remainder has been erased from the mind and the circulation restored to the numbed behind. The play scarcely develops beyond that point although we are obliged to witness Falstaff twice more humiliated by crude practical jokes. The other characters make a tiresome crew. Lila Kaye had the right idea in turning Mistress Quickly into a cockney prototype for comedy shows such as On the Buses (which was a good deal funnier than The Merry Wives) and Ben Kingsley used Ford to keep the pace going without, as the part invites, farcical overacting.
The best I can say about this tiresome play is that it gives a sense of Shakespeare's England, of its regional accents, its social gradations and town and country manners; John Napier's set reminded me a little of a pantomime set for Dick Whittington but it helped to convey a feeling of common life in Windsor as did the charming children at play and prayer. I just wish that every one could have been better employed.
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