LAUNDRY, LECHERY, LADIES, LAUGHTER
if anyone is ever so impertinent as to demand an audition piece from the RSC-seasoned John Hodgkinson, I suggest he delivers – with or without a mud-stained city suit – Sir John Falstaff’s indignant description of his ordeal in a basket of greasy stained laundry and the deep Thames mud, and tops it off by drinking a full quart of ale, while glaring furiously. A rapturous audience gave that effort of imbibing a slow handclap, rising to tumultuous applause.
The three piece blue city suit ,by the way, definitely adds to it, for Blanche McIntyre’s modern Merry Wives is set in today’s suburban Windsor, and this Falstaff’s knighthood clearly derives from some shady City deal rather than a royal court or noble ancestry. He is sleazily magnificent, venal, overconfident bossman of his scruffy pack, charming until panicking. The women in his eye are Siubhan Harrison’s Mistress Ford and her best friend Mistress Page (Samantha Spiro): both full of matronly mischief and schoolgirl theatricality, middle England neighbours, decked out at one point like gymbunnies in colourful Dryrobes with young Anne in tennis gear.
Around them Falstaff’s hooligan mates caper and quarrel and plot to get one of them the heiress Anne Page. Each of the posse is glorious in their own way, Emily Houghton finely crosscast as a punk Garter Inn host. Among the suitors Patrick Walshe McBride is a gawky, effeminate Slender, who can’t even stick his thumbs arrogantly in his pockets with the right buttons done up, and Ian Hughes the dodgy Welsh parson who, when panicking about the supposed duel, breaks quaveringly into Calon Lan while wielding his bike pump. Jason Thorpe creates Dr Caius as a vain French dentist whose accent confuses ear with arse, and Shazia Nicholls is a sportive, two timing Mistress Quickly working towards general confusion.
So far so sitcom, and beautifully done it is too. In the central scam, nothing could be more glorious than a man of Hodgkinson’s padded majesty coming on all kittenish, turning a tumble from the sofa into a beguiling Recamier pose and doing playful tiger snarls reminiscent of nothing more than certain accounts in the past of MeToo approaches of the kind later claimed as the woman’s idea. Treasure too the moments when Mistresses Ford and Page, with Falstaff,s vast waistcoated gut bulging behind the curtain, play their scene of affrighted panic very loud while struggling – in character, cushions on faces – to keep themselves from corpsing.
One notable thing McIntyre does – with a full rounded careful performance from Richard Goulding – is to give realism and real pain to Ford, the jealous husband, and also to the painful insult that his suspicion means to his wife: when he abases himself in apology she stands a moment, queenly, before forgiving him. That gives a tang to the comic nonsense, and strengthens it.
Until the final woodland scene it all takes place in Robert Innes Hopkins’ ingenious revolving neighbourhood, all half timbered pastiche houses with pylon wires overhead and, a TV aerial and a Yale burglar alarm (which I hope was product placement, if not they owe the RSC a bung, see how venal Falstaff makes you).
I must admit that I always fear anticlimax in the final fake-fairy scam about Herne the hunter, the fleeing couple and Falstaff in horns – too whimsically Elizabethan for now – ; but it was alldone with such style and dispatch, and offered such hilarity as Hodgkinson thinking for a moment he’s scored a threesome, that I loved it. That’s judgement, that’s pace, that’s RSC in one of its merry moods.
It got many stars and plaudits this summer, but I was away, so since it runs four more weeks I thought to catch up. A riotous matinee proved them right. Get there, do: Stratford is on a roll right now with this and Pericles and School for Scandal (scroll down, rvws both there). Worth anybody’s visit…
Www.rsc.org. To 7 september
rating. 5 mice
theatreCat 