The Merry Wives of Windsor

Published Thursday 19 June 2008 at 11:20 by Mark Shenton

The earnest visual austerity of the Rylance years at the Globe has long gone. Where the theatre’s magical thatched roofed wooden ‘O’ and decorated columns were previously considered to be distraction enough, Christopher Luscombe’s new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor offers a complete, complex set. Janet Bird’s designs not only put a whole house on stage, but a separate ramp walkway, complete with two small bridges and a surprise reveal of its own, also bisects the entire yard, putting the groundlings at the front into a pen of their own.

But that’s not the only innovative thing about this fast and furious farce of attempted cuckoldry that provides an evening of crowd-pleasing delight in the great populist arena of the Globe. Luscombe keeps up the pace but is ever mindful of a sense of place, and coming so soon after the recent RSC history plays, here’s the missing Falstaff sequel that relocates this larger-than-life knight at the centre of a riotously English sitcom of the kind Ray Cooney and the Carry On films might have scripted if they were around 400 years earlier.

While the RSC’s deadly musical version two Christmases ago fatally interposed spluttering songs, Luscombe’s buoyant production keeps it musical in other senses, most bracingly with the soundtrack of almost continuous laughter that the audience itself provides, while an onstage band punctuate but do not hold up the action. But it also keys into the play’s keen sense of subverted sexual politics, in which the vanity and insecurity of men are spectacularly controlled by the women.

While Christopher Benjamin’s Falstaff suffers serial humiliations in his misdirected passions for the wives of others, the husbands aren’t spared either, with Andrew Havill’s Ford made a fool of by his own making. It makes for an evening of unparalleled summer delight.