The RSC's big Christmas show this year is an all-guns-blazing
Merry Wives of Windsor, although the seasonal feel is more Halloween - complete with jack o'lantern in a window - than Christmas. Phillip Breen's modern dress production comes straight out of the pages of
Country Life, with wives in scarves and high-heeled wellies, and huntin', shootin', rugger-playing husbands. Legend has always had it that Elizabeth I herself requested that Shakespeare write
The Merry Wives of Windsor, wanting to see Falstaff in love. If that old story
were true, Shakespeare would probably have met with a sticky end because that's not what's provided here: Instead the fat old knight from
Henry IV is very much in lust, with two married, upper-middle-class women. They're better friends than he realised though, and on discovering he's sent them both identical love letters decide to lead him on, and into embarrassing and increasingly public mishaps.
