It is a sad day when Tony Blair gets a bigger audience at the Old Vic than the Royal Shakespeare Company. But whereas Blair's Fabian Society lecture last week was packed, the matinee performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor that I attended was scarcely a third full - a comment less on Rachel Kavanaugh's excellent production than on the RSC's folly in abandoning its permanent London base.
Kavanaugh sets her production in the England of 1947, a time when the old prewar class structures remained intact and demobbed servicemen were scrounging pints in Home Counties pubs. Falstaff, who probably had a cosy war in Aldershot, is now ensconced in Windsor accompanied by Nym and Pistol, whose decorations for valour are obviously nicked. The comedy stems from Falstaff's determination to fleece the middle classes, who, even in austerity Britain, were just beginning to flex their muscles.
Kavanaugh could have taken the class joke even further; it would have been fun to see the disguised Ford bribing Falstaff not just with a suitcase full of cash but with ration books and clothing coupons. But the production gets across the key point: that Falstaff, in seducing the Windsor wives, aims to combine pleasure and profit and get his revenge on the bourgeoisie. As the fat knight, Richard Cordery wonderfully combines dandyish vanity with a mercenary gleam.
What lifts the play above farce is the sudden intrusion of madness into middle-class Windsor. In that sense, the best role is that of the imaginary cuckold, Ford, whom Tom Mannion endows with a fine, bottled-up hysteria. For his disguised encounters with Falstaff, he becomes a dourly introspective Glaswegian. His melancholy carries over into the domestic scenes, where, having humiliated himself before his neighbours, he cries, "My jealousy is reasonable!" in tones of infinite pathos.
The one flaw in the updating is that it deprives the Windsor forest scenes of their quasi-medieval magic: a park bench is no substitute for Herne's Oak. But otherwise this is a first-rate production with a cast who, having been touring for months, look like a genuine company. Lucy Tregear and Claire Carrie are a highly spirited pair of wives, Alison Fiske's Mistress Quickly is Dickens's Sarah Gamp translated to Windsor and Greg Hicks's doctor, a whirlwind in brown check, only requires a responsive audience out front to become even funnier. The moral would seem to be that the sooner the RSC acquires a London base, the better it will be for everyone.
· In rep until August 23. Box office: 020-7369 1722.
