In one sense, Shakespeare’s circa-1597 love farce about duped seducers and wooers is a very modern product. It is a rapid sequel to a popular hit, even featuring, in the style of Superman and Harry Potter, the name of the marquee hero in the title: it was initially performed as Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor, granting a franchise to the obese, beery, leering knight previously seen as the mentor to Henry V.
However, in another aspect, The Merry Wives of Windsor, as it now identifies, chafes against contemporary sensitivities. The main sources of comedy are fat-shaming – whether Sir John’s belly, dimensions and contents widely analysed, will fit confined spaces – and the failure of foreigners to speak and act as the Queen’s subjects did, especially the Welsh and French, nations each represented by a gross caricature. Oh, and just how many words can make an English audience see penises or vaginas.
But director Sean Holmes exuberantly embraces all of this, locating, in Shakespeare’s most homely comedy (his one play with an English town in the title), a template for a national strain of populist drama, driven by innuendo and xenophobia, that stretches to Carry On and ’Allo, ’Allo.
Most words come twice. The devil who deceived Faust is pronounced “Mephisto-phallus.” Adam Wadsworth’s Dr Caius delivers “By Gar” (the text’s cod-Gallicism for “By God”) to sound suspiciously like “Bugger!”; the same actor quick-changing to a Slender with a Pythonesque funny walk, bow-legged and pigeon-toed.
The cast, though, also bring out what is most Shakespearean about this potboiler frivolity: the fascinated ear for speech. George Fouracres’ Falstaff has Midlands tones that may echo the playwright, and impressively moves from careless gluttony and lechery to the character’s later fear and fury. As Mistress Ford and Mistress Page – the Windsor wives who Falstaff jointly targets to double his odds of sex – Katherine Pearce and Emma Pallant glory in the story’s most modern element: women taking charge. Marcus Olale has the presence to show that he in future deserves a more rewarding role than the somewhat sub-plotty Fenton and Nym.
Even the admirable narrative clarity of Holmes’ staging can’t quite unravel the messy fifth act that – with tricks and faeries in a wood and Sir John lamenting that he has been turned into an ass – disconcertingly overlaps with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which, the RSC’s favoured timeline suggests, was written in close proximity. Holmes sensibly points up these parallels with a better-known piece for this season but it is finally the play that loses a fifth star for a joyous production that is a perfect summer night’s revel for tourists and citizens alike.
• At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, from 13 July to 20 September
• This article was amended on 11 July 2025. Falstaff was the mentor of (the eventual) Henry V, not Henry IV as an earlier version said.
