I'd been fully expecting the RSC to announce that Antony Sher would return to the role of Sir John Falstaff "by" "popular" "demand" when the complete works got round to
The Merry Wives of Windsor, but apparently
King Lear marked the First Lady's retirement from Shakespeare so instead it's another RSC stalwart who gets a crack at one of the most popular characters, albeit in his least popular appearance. David Troughton plays Falstaff in a play rumoured, somewhat dubiously, to have been commissioned by Elizabeth I herself when she wanted to see more of the breakout star of the
Henry IV plays. It's this legend Fiona Laird's production takes as its starting-point, with a Terry Gilliam-style animation of the Queen demanding Shakespeare get out of bed and write her a spin-off in two weeks (a timescale that, let's face it, isn't rendered
entirely implausible by much of what follows.)
