Merry Wives of Windsor, Pericles
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

The Stratford season opened last week with The Merry Wives of Windsor in a production full of quiet charm and local colour. 

I can never think of this play as taking place in its advertised location; to me it’s a play about Stratford, as I assume it must have been for the author. If he wrote it as quickly as tradition insists, he would hardly have had the time to go reconnoitring along the Thames. He must have reached back into his own beyond. If you really want to read Shakespeare’s autobiography in his plays, then avert your eyes from the mysteries of Hamlet and The Tempest; look instead at the brief scene in which a shuffling schoolboy (called William) is exposed to a Latin viva under the doting but doubting eye of his mother.

Schoolchildren, dressed up as fairies for the taunting of Falstaff, provide the finale of the play and Trevor Nunn’s production gives them plenty of preliminary build-up: we see Elizabethan youth infesting the streets, playing conkers, taunting Peter Simple (here played as the village idiot, which may be in line with the robust Tudor idea of a joke, but is a bit of a damper now) and eventually - in the shape of Falstaff’s page - providing a fat and thwarted knight with his only remaining companionship.

In all this, Mr Nunn’s production is the heir of Terry Hand’s previous RSC model, which it also resembles in the carefully domesticity of its setting. The middle classes rise before our eyes; John Napier’s beguiling set is timbered, thatched, cobbled, mullioned - in fact, it only needs a few tourists to make it seem an extension of the world just outside the theatre,

Howard Brenton once declared that there are only two kinds of plays: plays set in rooms and plays not set in rooms. The Merry Wives is the only Shakespeare play to belong irretrievably in the first category. I suppose an abstract bare production is just about conceivable; most directors, however, give in to the temptations of realism, as presented by dialogue stuffed with law suits and laundry lists.

Mr Nunn’s production gains on Mr Hands in its careful treatment of the supporting bourgeoisie: particularly notable are David Threifall’s mooncalf Slender, Kate Nicholl’s Anne Page, and Geoffrey Hutching’s French doctor, a tidy volcano. (That long double take when he discovers Simple hiding in the closet, and reaches the front door before registering the fact- had I seen it before or was it merely a folk memory?) John McEnery makes sense of Pistol.

The central comedy, though, is less happy. The wives (Jane Downs and Susan Tracy) are not very merry and are frankly hard to tell apart. John Woodvine is a fine active comedian (of The Alchemist and The Comedy of Errors), but Falstaff in this play is a perpetual victim, needing above all the massive dignity that demands deflation: the quality that Brewster Mason had in the role and that Mr Woodvine, whose voice does not seem to match his padding, seems to lack.

However, the real originality of this farce lies in its provision of a second fall-guy; whatever hurts Falstaff goes double for Ford. Ben Kingsley makes him a deceiving bouncing blend of masochist and voyeur, his disguise a neat anticipation of bowler and dirty Mac, his jealous soliloquies always starting a second earlier than you would think possible. He can, by such technical means, be funny, but he is too manic for comedy to flow easily from him.

In Stratford’s Other Place, Ron Daniels has directed a necessarily plain version of Pericles, another play with a passive hero. To the ill-luck that dogs the protagonist in the shapes of lost wives and daughters, storms at sea, and encounters with incestuous despots, must be added the crushing blow of being removed from the play just when the writing is starting to improve. The first two acts either are not by Shakespeare at all or have suffered whole sale textual corruption; the relief to the ear when we finally arrive at verse that moves in paragraphs instead of single lame sentences is hardly to be described.

Only Griffith Jones’s Gower, a gentle storyteller possessed by his story, escapes the monotony of the first half, despite staging visually ingenious and spiritually apt. When Gower mentions Antiochus, Antiochus simply appears, followed by a row of severed heads - a perfect image of fairyland tyranny. The long pantomime of Pericles’s wooing is presented with a a well stylized tournament (and less happy dance), but it drags; Peter McEnery is always sympathetic - and, when he returns for the reconciliation, moving- but her never achieves the Everyman status desirable in a hero almost uncannily innocent of personal attributes.

Studio Shakespeare can grab you more immediately than the full-stage variety, but it requires acting of unusual intensity and moment-to-moment suppleness to hold you throughout. Not all these actors come through; Marina (Julie Peasgond) makes it, but with nothing to spare. However, Peter Clough is economically good at the complexities of her seducer-turned-rescuer, and Emily Richard similarly adept as her unfortunate mum; while Jeffery Dench does a striking (and probably symbolic) double of King and Pandar. The brothel scene in this play I would place second to the Windsor Latin-lesson as the obvious fruits of personal experience.