No one would go to the stake to defend Shakespeare’s exuberant comedy against innovative directors. All the same, I am puzzled by some of the choices made by Fiona Laird in her RSC debut. She endows the wives with estuary accents and relocates the action from middle-class Windsor to modern Essex. Even if the production, decked out with physical comedy from Spymonkey’s Toby Park, gets a fair share of laughs, it often works against the grain of the text.
Transferring the action to Essex involves a good deal of rewriting. Falstaff, in his abortive amorous sorties, is first thrust into a wheelie-bin rather than a buck-basket and later disguises himself as “the fat woman of Brentwood” rather than of Brentford. His final humiliation takes place in a town square, dominated by a statue of Elizabeth I, rather than in Windsor Park: this not only deprives the climax of rural magic but makes you wonder why he would turn up in the guise of Herne the Hunter. Laird’s intention is clearly to show a sexual predator being vanquished by resourceful women, but that is built into the play anyway: what I missed was any sense of a real community with its own smug social codes.
Fortunately, there are some good performances. David Troughton, equipped with a permanently projecting codpiece and caressing his body with ill-disguised delight, is a first-rate Falstaff and enunciates every syllable with great clarity. Beth Cordingly and Rebecca Lacey make the point that wives may be merry without being treated as sexual objects and Jonathan Cullen as Dr Caius wrings every laugh out of the funny-Frenchman joke by pronouncing “ears” as “arse”. Vince Leigh, however, never fully captures the torment of the insanely jealous Ford and it is typical of the production’s approach that David Acton as the Welsh parson leads the audience in a chorus of Bread of Heaven but loses his Latin lesson with William Page. You can do many things to show this is a play about small-town life, but I’d suggest the only way isn’t Essex.
- At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 22 September. Then at Barbican, London, 7 December to 5 January.
