Review: THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR at Shakespeare's Globe

In this comedy set in Windsor, the roguish Sir John Falstaff attempts to seduce two married women, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. but when they receive identical love letters from him, the two ladies catch on and team up to teach Falstaff a lesson. At the same time, the hapless Ford tries to catch his wife in an act of infidelity, and the Pages squabble over who to marry off their daughter Ann to.

Overall, the production felt a bit like watching an installment of the Carry On franchise: it leans heavily into the silliness of the plot and characters, and much of the humour comes from its self awareness of its own folly. For instance, Ford’s over-the-top reactions, from comically horrified expressions as he realises that he’s allowed Falstaff to seduce his wife to his outraged shriek when he learns that Falstaff was hiding in the comically large basket he’d somehow overlooked, highlight the absurdity of the story while poking fun at it in a way that invites the audience to laugh along. Other comedy can be found in the constant crotch thrusts and sex-related puns (‘Mephisto-phallus’ was a real crowd pleaser) and then frenetic sense of chaos as the various sub-plots collided in a typically Shakespearean over-the-top finale.

Grace Smart’s set design is dominated by a cheerfully pastel colour palette, with the overflowing cast of characters helpfully colour coded for our convenience - the majority wear a mix of powder blue, turquoise, and yellow, with family members matching each other’s colour schemes, while Falstaff and his retinue stand out in bold shades of red. This feels like a deliberate tool to keep track of a dizzyingly convoluted plot involving multiple characters allying with and double-crossing each other. Despite that, I overheard many audience members talking about how they had lost track of the story. One wonders if Holmes could have given this bloated plot a bit of a trim - did we really need the lesson on Latin grammar, which would have been more amusing to Elizabethan authors than it was to a modern one?

The cast is the saving grace of the play; each actor plays off the other with sizzling chemistry and impeccable comedic timing that earned a lot of laughs even when it felt as though the plot was dragging. Jolycon Coy as Ford is delightfully bumbling in his endless misfortune, and hilarious in his hysterical nervous breakdowns. Samuel Creasey as Hugh and Adam Wadsworth as Doctor Caius bring an almost cartoonish energy with their exaggerated Welsh and French accents respectively. Wadsworth is unrecognisable in his doubled part as the awkward Slender, who is brilliantly stiff and unromantic in his half-hearted attempts to woo Ann Page. Katherine Pearce and Emma Pallant have unbeatable chemistry as Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, each alternating between playing the straight man to the other’s moments of zaniness.

Undoubtedly, George Fouracres stole the show as Falstaff. The most interesting thing for me was the subtle shift in Falstaff’s character from buffoonish villain to loveable rogue and almost sympathetic antihero. Fouracres plays him with a charismatic swagger that makes even his sleaziness endearing, and by the end, he cuts a forlorn figure after his torment at the hands of the other characters. There seems to be a genuine, affectionate connection between him and Mistress Ford, who looks at him stricken when she’s reunited with her husband, that suggests he was never really the true villain of the story.

Despite an often clunky plot and characters that feel like parodies of themselves, The Merry Wives of Windsor achieves what it set out to do: get a lot of laughs, and take audiences along for a wild ride of mayhem and confusion that doesn’t take itself too seriously.