Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare's Globe)

George Fouracres seems to be absolutely speeding his way through the big Shakespearean comic roles at the Globe, and has already got to Sir John Falstaff - the slightly alternate Merry Wives of Windsor version who tends to be portrayed as a bit fluffier than the manipulative old thief of the Henriad. Although maybe not so different in Sean Holmes' new take, which leans into the fact that, like many a later farce, this one also builds its embarrassments and misunderstandings on some pretty dark motivations. So Fouracres' Falstaff has to win the audience's sympathy through the humiliations he's put through - he's a bombastic bully who makes jokes about drowning puppies, and plots to seduce two married women less out of lust than malice: He'll enjoy humiliating their husbands by cuckolding them, and maybe burgle their houses as well while he's there.

The titular wives are a nice, and fairly rare example of Shakespearean women just being friends without rivalry or agenda, and when they quickly figure out the knight is trying to play them both, they team up to trap and trick him.

But here we also get a real distinction between their circumstances and their personalities: Mistress Page's (Emma Pallant) husband (Christopher Logan) trusts her, and she whole-heartedly jumps into the plot to humiliate Falstaff - at times with unseemly glee at the crueller moments. Frank Ford (Jolyon Coy) on the other hand is inherently distrusftul of his wife, and where George Page more or less gets through the play unscathed, Ford's attitude is punished by making him the play's second-biggest foil for humiliation.

This second marriage doesn't seem a happy one, so in the production's biggest twist we see Mistress Ford (Katherine Pearce) actually consider a physical relationship with the much-younger-than-usual Falstaff, and eventually regret both the things they put him through and having to return to her boorish husband at the end. The look into the darker edge of the play continues into the finale, where a trick usually shown as just frightening the cowardly knight here takes a literal interpretation of the references to the townsfolk burning and branding him.

The main subplot has the Pages' daughter Anne (Danielle Phillips) trying to make sure she can marry her own choice, Fenton (Marcus Olale,) over the two idiots her parents have lined up for her. Throwing his own hat into the ring to be the venue's resident class clown, Adam Wadsworth plays both of the latter, the sitcom Frenchman Dr Caius and the robotically awkward Slender.

The other attempts at subplots don't really make an impact but it's not like Holmes has got Shakespeare's best material to work with there; Sophie Russell keeps the energy going as Mistress Quickly acts as go-between for the various tricks and tangles, while there's also a scene I assume must get cut quite often because I have no memory of seeing it - before Samuel Creasey's Hugh Evans demonstrating what a good teacher he is by getting the Pages' youngest (Odhran Riddell or Alexander Shaw) to recite all the vaguely dirty-sounding Latin terms he knows.

This play has never really managed to make a case for itself as equal to the more popular comedies, and at times Holmes' take on it seems to underplay even its few highlights - Falstaff's dunking ends up with him returning to the stage with marginally wetter clothes than before, while Grace Smart's designs dressing everyone in homogenous suburban wallpaper misses the chance for some more striking visuals. But a darker take on The Merry Wives of Windsor is certainly a more unusual idea than the ubiquitous darker Midsummer Night's Dream, so  the idea of looking at the less salubrious underside of the suburban farce does at least give this an edge to make it stand out from other productions.

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 20th of September at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.