The story of the cuckolding of the boorish and rotund Sir John Falstaff is seldom performed, but it’s ideal Summer Shakespeare fare.

Over the top comedy performed at break neck speed is the recipe that tends to work best and that’s certainly the case here. Though at 155 minutes it’s on the long side, especially with the weather proving temperamental.

The cast is huge, another bonus for a Summer Shakespeare production, and unlike many of the Bard’s plays the spotlight is relatively evenly spread. As for the story, think Desperate Housewives meets Fawlty Towers. The lecherous Falstaff tries to seduce two married women but ends up paying a high price for his folly. He’s not the only one cuckolded, with many a sub plot revolving around the marriage of the beautiful and wealthy Anne Page (Alice Pearce).

Lawrence describes Merry Wives as a Renaissance equivalent of an episode of the aforementioned Fawlty Towers and you can sense the actors playing Mr Ford and Mrs Page – Daniel Watterson and Louise Burston – channelling Cleese’s mania rather more than the others.

Benjamin Haddock is rather young and slender to play Falstaff but is an admirable rascal and his final humiliation seems rather too harsh. Stand out performances from Jessica Aaltonen as the quick witted housekeeper Nell and Laura Feslier is an elegant Alice Ford, as well as Ralph Upton as Anne’s father, Helen Sims as the villainous Nym, Kirsty Bruce as the grasping hotelier and James Barber is an assured Robert Shallow, while Melanie Camp shows commendable vocal dexterity as the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans.

Take a cushion and maybe also a brolly, if you’re of a nervous disposition avoid the front row, and have a ball courtesy of this fabulous cast, director and crew. 
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It is rumoured that Queen Elizabeth I was so taken with Shakespeare’s drunken knight Falstaff in the two Henry IV plays that she asked him to write a play about Falstaff and his love conquests.

Whether she would have recognised Falstaff from David Lawrence’s production is debatable, but from what we know of the Queen she would have certainly enjoyed the over-the-top slapstick humour and physicality of his production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. 

Written as pure entertainment with no heavy or hidden meaning or insights into the humour condition – “ a crazy sitcom”, as Lawrence calls it in his programme notes – the play lends itself admirably to Lawrence’s style of directing. 

Boisterous, although fortunately not overly bawdy, the production canters along at a fast pace from start to finish, the large cast working exceptionally well as a team moving about with assured confidence, the scenes flowing effortlessly form one to the other, all the cast appearing to enjoy themselves as much as Shakespeare probably did writing it. 

Even if some of the dialogue is rushed over, the physical nature of the production conveys adequately the story of Falstaff (Benjamin Haddock) trying to win the hearts of Mrs Page (Louise Burston) and Mrs Ford (Laura Feslier) in order to get his hands on the wealth of Mr Page (Ralph Upton) and Mr Ford (Daniel Watterson). 

There are also a number of other sub plots running through the play including the more romantic wooing of Anne Page (Alice Pearce) by the hapless Fenton (Blair Everson). Abraham Slender (Michael Pohl), aided by his uncle Robert Shallow (James Barber), and the French physician Dr Caius (Florence Mato) with his housekeeper Nell Quickly (Jessica Aaltonen) in tow, are also trying to win over Anne. 

Overseeing and commenting on much of the action is the Welsh priest Sir Hugh Evans (Melanie Camp). 

While the purists will pine to hear the musicality of the language, and the use of gesture and facial expression is often over done – every line, every word almost, appears to have some physical attribute attached to it – there are nevertheless some genuinely funny moments. Falstaff’s two ignominious departures from the Ford household cases in point. 

It is interesting to note, however, that in the contrasting characterisations of Mrs Ford and Mrs Page, it was the subtle, effective delivery of the lines of Laura Feslier’s Mrs Ford that got as many if not more laughs than the flaying arms and legs portrayal of Louise Burston’s Mrs Page, showing that regardless of what you do with Shakespeare the language is still his greatest asset.

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John has already reviewed this production in its preview setting of Gladstone Vineyard. It has since relocated to the amphitheatre at Studio 77.

My absence from Wellington for nearly ten years has meant that what may have occurred as evolution to others has taken me by surprise. The Summer Shakespeare productions of the ’80s and ’90s were gargantuan affairs involving teams of production people collaborating to wow audiences. These productions would play to hundreds every night. Thus it was a bit surprising to rock up to this venue that holds maybe eighty, tops.

Admittedly, this means that we actually hear everything happening on stage and the combination of intimacy and the outdoor setting is refreshing. I do wonder though what has changed – is it audience or thespian interest that has waned, or is it a case of one feeding off the other? Am I being nostalgic and not moving with the times, or have we lost something of real value here?

But I digress.

We arrive at the amphitheatre to find a wedding party in full swing. Frank and Alice Ford are off having their photos done one presumes, and their families and friends are ensuring the guests are made welcome. Lovely touch. I immediately try to work out what the ‘take’ is going to be – no-one does Shakespeare 16^th century style so there has to be some kind of theme. I am thinking – 1950’s? 1960’s maybe? Costumes are from every era of the last 50 years. Why? Is this intentional or do they just not have a clue? I hastily apply benefit of the doubt and settle into the show.

It is interval before I read the Director’s note and the whole thing clunks into place for me. This show is a David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd sitcom or maybe a farce in the great British tradition, where slapstick, mistaken identity and coarse acting are the name of the game. And indeed, the play is just that. None of your higher themes or serious plot threaded with the humorous one here. It sits in a continuum of ribald British comedy that succeeds The Canterbury Tales and precedes The Country Wife right through to the Carry On movies, No Sex Please, We’re British and Blackadder.

With this revelation in mind, I started to enjoy some parts more and other parts less. I wanted to see stronger use of the possibilities this genre allowed for. Why not a hotelier who’s a sassy Bet Lynch or a René Artois? I wanted to see Nell Quickly (Jessica Aaltonen) embrace the physicality of the 1960’s instead of striding around in sneakers like a boy. I fall more in love with Daniel Watterson’s Frank Ford who pays tribute to Basil Fawlty without giving up his own interpretation of the part.

I adore the rabble of villagers adorned in every outfit from tennis player, baker, person interrupted from their bath, French mime etc.; every one completely in their chosen character. All it needs was a French maid and a nun! Yet for the same reason I want the Germans not in earnest, matching khaki, but in lederhosen with a big curly moustache, and a dirndl with big buns over the ears. In other words, I want more, not less, of the farce.

I wish that the production values were stronger to support a cast that worked the space like there was no tomorrow. The show is swept up in their energy and fizz, and the dizzy pace, lightning set changes and great use of physical comedy and indeed the space itself, do a lot to keep the audience involved and not sidetracked by what might be missing.

Given that the production began before the play and the cast entertains us in the interval with live music, I’d also love to see a curtain call with the same joie de vivre – music played, maybe some dancing either spontaneous or choreographed. The cast certainly deserves their applause and would get a lot more, I feel, if they had the means to milk the moment.

We leave feeling comedically satisfied rather than intellectually challenged, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. A great time was had by all.
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Scholars have it that Queen Elizabeth I demanded a play about Falstaff in love after seeing him in Henry IV Part 1 (1596). The result, initially entitled Sir John Falstaff and The Merry Wives of Windsor (and probably much shorter than what we now know as The Merry Wives of Windsor), is first believed to have been performed for the Queen at the Garter Feast in April 1597, before the errant knight returned to be rejected by Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 2 (1598) then was killed off in absentia in Henry V (1598), which was last year’s VUW Summer Shakespeare. 

Despite being hugely popular in its time (if the seven quarto editions published before the first folio are anything to go by), the full three-hour play – as performed for this year’s VUW Summer Shakespeare – cannot be said to be one of William Shakespeare’s more profoundly insightful comedies.

Presumably its initial purpose was to amuse her majesty with a light-hearted tale of how the foolish Sir John Falstaff, fallen on hard times, simultaneously tries to woo two rich wives – Meg Page and Alice Ford – and gets his come-uppance, while the course of true love is finally allowed for Mistress Anne Page and the impoverished Fenton (whose scenes, incidentally, are the only ones in blank verse). The longer play adds – among other things – the complication of two other suitors for Anne, with George and Meg Page championing the causes of the twittish Abraham Slender and the French physician Dr Caius, respectively.  

The result is rather patchy. The gulling of Falstaff in the climactic Herne’s oak scene lacks the dramatic impact or poignancy offered when similar fates befall Malvolio (Twelfth Night), Parolles (All’s Well that Ends Well) and Nick Bottom (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The lovers’ scenes are so few and brief that they cannot hope to engage as the Athenians do in the Dream. And the comic carry-on is not offset by matters of greater dramatic import, as in those other comedies, where quests unachieved may result in death, for example, let alone the war-faring drama of the Henry histories.

That said, as we have come to expect in a David Lawrence-directed Shakespeare, the large cast brings great commitment, energy, clarity and fun to this production, presented in modern dress so that Falstaff’s sudden loss of fortune may be related to the recession, etc. But at the final of three previews at Gladstone Vineyard in the Wairarapa – a splendid setting for it – the pursuit of love and its comic consequences were thrown severely out of whack by some desperately coarse acting.

Those who draw their comedy from truth in their well-grounded characterisations include Laura Feslier (Alice Ford), Alice Pearce (Anne Page), Ralph Upton (George Page), Melanie Camp (the Welsh parson Sir High Evans), Florence Mato (the French physician Dr Caius) and – most of the time – Jessica Aaltonen (Nell Quickly).  

As the broader comic characters Robin (Falstaff’s page), Bardolf (a thief), Pistol (a grafter) and Nym (a cony-catcher), Dominic McElwee, Tamas Molnar, Vicky Roper and Helen Sims respectively acquit themselves with distinction. Apart from a voice that sounds too young and sober, rather than irreparably pickled in ‘sack’, Benjamin Haddock’s Falstaff is fine although he could display more of the boorish hyper confidence usually associated with the role.

What distorts the production badly for me is Louise Burston’s Meg Page and Daniel Watterson’s Frank Ford, who disguises himself as a wealthy gent named Brook in order to expose Falstaff and his supposedly unfaithful wife. I can’t see the characters for the acting. They are either showing off, or they think we are thick and need it all spelled out, or both. I want to get it, not duck it.  

Some of the others – e.g. Aaltonen’s Mistress Quickly and Kirsty Bruce’s Host of the Garter Inn – show signs of aspiring to this level of coarse acting, which gives me even more reason to challenge it.   

The set design has yet to be seen (in the Wellington season) but the costumes – co-ordinated by Marly Doyle and Lisa Doherty – range from splendidly appropriate to strangely idiosyncratic, as if half the cast had got waylaid en route to the Sevens.

The ensemble acting is excellent, as is the singing – with added extras in the interval – and overall we have another example of an energetic young cast thrilling to the delights of Shakespeare. Long may it continue.
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