We All Laugh At Falstaff
The Merry Wives of Windsor
the Stratford Festival
The National Post
Stratford this year begins operations with The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is set in a period somewhere between late Regency and early Pickwickian. In fact, Geraint Wyn Davies' rubicund Falstaff carries himself initially like Mr. Pickwick, which is disconcerting considering that Dickens' protagonist is benevolent and virginal while Shakespeare's is anything but. But he soon gets over it.
The choice of period, too, seems at first perverse, for a play whose main attraction is its homely, informed portrayal of Elizabethan small-town life. Something does get lost, but on its own terms Robert Perdziola's design proves attractive, unobtrusive and versatile.
As does Frank Galati's whole production, his Stratford Festival debut. It's blessedly unforced and perceptive nearly all the way through, and it makes excellent use of that princely, demanding stage. It's also very funny, at least some of the time. That it isn't more consistently so can to a large extent be blamed on the play itself, which takes the classic comic “Rule of Three” to the grim extreme of staging the same situation time after time and then after time.
Sir John Falstaff, cast adrift from his career in the history plays but still carrying the same weight and a portion of the same wit, pays avaricious court to two comfortable housewives, the Mistresses Ford and Page. Very much not turned on, they lure him into a trio of assignations in which he is a) consigned to a laundry basket full of foul linen and tossed into the Thames; b) dressed up as an old woman, in which guise he is savagely beaten by Mistress Ford's jealous husband; and c) persuaded to show up in Windsor Forest at midnight, got up as the legendary Herne the Hunter, complete with horns, there to be pinched and tormented by a gang of local children pretending to be fairies.
Fool you thrice, what are we to make of you? The Falstaff of Henry IV also falls victim to practical jokes, but never to the same one even twice, and up until his last tragic mistake he always manages to talk his way out of things. This Falstaff gets resigned, in a way previously unheard of. The real problem, though, is not that the two Sir Johns are different animals -in fact they have quite a lot in common -but that this new one operates in so restricting a framework. His three sitcom episodes play themselves out in descending order of hilarity.
There's a lot to enjoy, though, on the way down. Wyn Davies, apart from providing a very persuasive outline of an adventurer down on his uppers, fastens with lyrical relish on every flavourful line the script gives him; physically, he's richly and even subtly inventive. The buckbasket scene and its immediate consequences are masterfully handled by all concerned, especially Tom Rooney's Master Ford, the first in Shakespeare's self- tormenting line of imaginary cuckolds. I have seen Fords more hysterically funny than Rooney's (correction, I've seen one -the late Ian Richardson), but his is still memorably masochistic, especially in his interactions with Falstaff's footbath and with an all too snug-fitting brandy glass. He also digs unusually deep and disturbingly into Ford's eagerness to believe the worst of his wife, to whom Lucy Peacock also gives some moments of troubled awareness to balance her irresistible delight in controlling the main farcical action.
These Fords have a real relationship going, and one feels an unaccustomed satisfaction at their reconciliation, plus severe misgivings at how long it will last. Their counterparts, the Pages, are less interesting. Laura Condlin doesn't have the authority, or indeed the experience, to be a worthy partner for Peacock; Tom McCamus does everything possible for her complacent spouse but there isn't much to do. He's at his best when playing the tyrannical father in one of the play's many subplots.
The most promising of these, the abortive duel between a timid Welsh parson and a bellicose French physician, is one of the production's few outright miscalculations. The situation is never made clear, and it's further confused by making the supposedly terrified Sir Hugh (Andrew Gillies) as enthusiastic a fire-eater as his Gallic opponent (Nigel Bennett, explosively effective in his first scene but with nowhere to go thereafter). Given the play's reliance on dialect comedy, it's instructive that Doctor Caius' insistence that sexual jealousy "is not the fashion in France" goes down a topical treat, while Falstaff's expostulations in the last scene about "that Welsh fairy" fall unaccustomedly flat, perhaps because he himself sounds the more authentically Welsh of the two.
Very good indeed - in fact my favourite in the cast - is James Blendick's Justice Shallow, a character even further removed than Falstaff from his chronicle-play prototype, played here as a tetchy squire, very much on his dignity and in rich, relaxed voice. Especially delightful is his exasperation at his young cousin Slender's hopeless idea of romantic courtship, the lad being played charmingly if with almost too much restraint by Christopher Prentice. The last woodland scene isn't as healingly festive as it's trying to be, but it looks lovely, with Herne's Oak itself descending from nowhere to make a real gnarled picture.