Okay, this bawdy domestic comedy featuring the fat knight Falstaff in wooing mode is never going to rank among Shakespeare’s greatest plays, but a fine cast of comic actors make Sean Holmes’s rare London revival a treat. It’s led by George Fouracres, the Black Country comedian-turned-actor who’s brought revelatory zest to several Shakespearean clowns at the Globe in recent years.
Here, his Falstaff is resplendently pear-shaped in red silk and polished greaves, a sheepskin cloak on his shoulders and a roguish twinkle in his eye. There’s spirit and sport as well as greed in his decision to woo two married women, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, and enough shaggy, grizzled charm about him to support Holmes’s conceit that Mistress Ford might actually be tempted.
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Fouracres is funny to his bones and knows how to work the Globe’s groundling audience, though weirdly he throws away one of my favourite one-liners in the entire Complete Works. Falstaff, having been carried away in a laundry basket under the nose of Mistress Ford’s jealous husband and dumped in the Thames, declines the offer of an egg in a warming cup of fortified wine with the words “I’ll no pullet sperm in my brewage”. Oh well.
That laundry basket is the only concession designer Grace Smart makes to a set, apart from a beautiful, William Morris-ish design on the back wall that’s echoed in the wittily elegant costumes. Otherwise, it’s just actors on a bare stage, as in Shakespeare’s day: the play, supposedly written at the behest of Elizabeth I - and at speed - transplants Falstaff from the reigns of Henry VI and V to hers.
Katherine Pearce’s saucy Mistress Ford somewhat resembles the virgin queen with her red hair and white face. It’s typically playful of Holmes to imagine Shakespeare might have depicted his monarch and patroness in romantic dalliance. Pearce and Emma Pallant’s lofty, beady Mistress Page display the fine timing and physical ease of a practiced double-act as they dupe and then punish Falstaff for his impudence.
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Jolyon Coy’s Ford’s Page, in disguise, has something of Michael Palin’s frantically repressed desperation as he repeatedly hears from Falstaff how he’s been outwitted and possibly cuckolded. Adam Wadsworth pulls out all the stops as the outrageous, hot-tempered and extravagantly-moustachioed French physician Caius, whose regular cries of “By Gar!” quickly morph into an earthier “bugger!” It’s to his credit that I didn’t realise Wadsworth was also playing the comically doddery Slender, Caius’s rival for the hand of Page’s daughter Anne in the subplot, till I checked the programme.
There’s fine work too from Sophie Russell as pragmatic fixer Mistress Quickly and Samuel Creasey as the effete Welsh priest, Hugh Evans. LJ Parkinson, using a wheelchair after an injury, incorporates it deftly into their performance as Pistol. Parkinson also plays the tavern host in the lame second subplot, but Holmes manages to wring some laughs even from that.
The director tilts the action towards folk horror in the penultimate scene where Falstaff, antlered like the mythic Herne the Hunter, is tormented for a final time by the Windsor gentlefolk, all disguised as grotesque fairies. But he dispatches the big knight sweetly, with a kiss and a quiet withdrawal from the stage. This Shakespearean curiosity has been most handsomely and thoughtfully mounted.
In rep to Sat 8 Sept, shakespearesglobe.com.
