Read The Merry Wives of Windsor Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
The Merry Wives of Windsor (23 page)
Any disappointments in 1964 were more than made up for by the next production. Directed for the RST by a young Terry Hands making his Stratford debut, the 1968 production was an unqualified success with both critics and audiences. It was to transfer to the Aldwych, go out on a national tour, and return again for a second Stratford season before being sent out on a further tour, this time to Japan. It was revived again in 1975, followed by yet another London transfer.
The key to the production’s success was twofold. Hands grounded the play in a detailed, sharply observed social context, giving it what Philip French writing in the
New Statesman
described as “solidity, a rooted quality.”
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He continued:
3.
Terry Hands’s 1968 RSC production: Brenda Bruce as Mistress Page and Elizabeth Spriggs as Mistress Ford were “pretty well flawless.”
The burghers, Ford and Page and their wives, are presented as extraordinarily pleased with their way of life, self-congratulatory in their finery, proud of their well-ordered homes, and looking happily on as their children play in the
clean streets and get a veneer of improving culture from Sir Hugh Evans.
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Similarly, Michael Billington commented on the 1976 revival:
The virtue of Hands’s production is that it realises money rather than sex is the mainspring of the plot … getting and spending is the theme; and Hands places this against a fully-realised country town … where the children run through the streets playing football, conkers and Opiesque
*
games and where the bourgeoisie close ranks against the threat of knightly invasion.
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Within this context, however, Hands pushed everything to extremes: “Bursting with high spirits and parading its priapic jokes … on the surface the evening looks one of exaggeration: the Welsh are so Welsh, the French are so French, and isn’t it going to be so smelly in the Thames tonight”;
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“The formula is to play everything for all it’s worth.”
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It proved a winning combination: Hands had “performed … a miracle … A truly funny play.”
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The interpretation was, of course, highly dependent on its actors. Richardson (Ford) and Bruce (Mistress Page) were recast in their 1964 roles, winning praise as before, though this time as members of an outstanding ensemble. They were joined by Jeffrey Dench as Page, and Elizabeth Spriggs as a Mistress Ford who for once “hover[ed] on the brink of giving [Falstaff] credence,”
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“waking to the joys of intrigue with endearingly innocent delight.”
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D. A. N. Jones commented in
The Listener:
The wives are pretty well flawless. Ford would necessarily be jealous about a wife like Elizabeth Spriggs. There are secrets and mysteries in this marriage … It is equally understandable that Page should not be worried … Independent and boyish, his wife is quite familiar and comprehensible to him; their marriage is more easy-going, less exciting.
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Young considered Brewster Mason an “admirable” Falstaff, with an “almost leonine head above a vast pear-shaped body, and a knightly dignity that never [forsook] him,” adding: “The contrast of Falstaff’s courtly pretensions with his frivolous behaviour … [had never been] better nor more consistently suggested.”
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The production’s powerful closing image showed Falstaff, alone on stage after the townsfolk had left, exiting with his “podgy” page Robin in his arms, “quell[ing] the laughter” with “a sudden serious moment” which suggested that Falstaff was “more generous than any of them.”
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Timothy O’Brien’s design was Elizabethan in tone, with realistic costumes against a stylized set. The palette was subtle and warmly autumnal, oranges, greens, and browns predominating with occasional blues and reds. The attractive and substantial costumes displayed period detail while appearing with their floral designs to be made of tapestry; a flooring of patchwork carpet squares echoed the checkered motif of the settings, “Toytown building blocks” which formed “skeletal scenes through and about which the company [could] move, generally at an indignant run.”
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In 1975 Terry Hands revived the production again, this time as the culmination of a Stratford season that opened with
Henry V
and then added both parts of
Henry IV;
Mason returned to play Falstaff throughout. Richardson, Dench, and Bruce reprised Ford, Page, and Mistress Page once more, though Barbara Leigh-Hunt replaced Spriggs as Mistress Ford. The production itself remained essentially the same, and resulted in the same favorable reviews.
On the subsequent London transfer, special notice went to two new-comers: Irving Wardle praised the “maladroit precision” of Ben Kingsley as Slender and commented: “Ann Hasson converts Anne Page from the usual insipid virgin into a downright tough girl, characteristically seen charging downstage to snarl at us that rather than marry Slender she would be ‘sat in the earth and bowled to death with turnips.’ ”
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Trevor Nunn’s similarly realistic production four years later was another success, emphasizing “such themes as the pursuit of money,
revenge, and underhanded sexual intrigue.”
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Michael Billington in the
Guardian
concluded:
The Terry Hands production was … funnier but Mr Nunn uncovers more in the text. I had never, for instance, noticed before how everyone is obsessed with revenge … Nunn offers us not rampant farce but a revenge comedy that ends … in reconciliatory handshakes as everyone drifts back to their safe cosy world.
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Analyzing the play’s financial transactions, Benedict Nightingale suggested:
By fixing the play so firmly in its tiny grasping world, Nunn is able to bring out what perhaps it subliminally is, Shakespeare’s protest at a materialism, greed and indifference to people that infects the newly-prosperous bourgeoisie as much as … the crook or near-crook classes.
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Nunn was the first to characterize the Herne’s Oak sequence as Halloween festivities, transforming the mood and introducing an eerie tone. Thomas Laroque considered that he successfully made the audience’s “flesh creep,” but complained this made “the return to light hearted comedy or farce … all the more difficult.”
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John Napier’s lavish Elizabethan settings were universally admired, providing a supportively detailed context of “half-timbered houses, mullioned windows, rows of washing, leaf-shedding branches and a Windsor signpost” signaling “a play built round a specific bourgeois society … of birding, hare coursing and hot venison pasties.”
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Both set and costumes were in sepia, brown, black, white, with touches of red for Falstaff and Robin.
However, despite the play’s overall success, John Woodvine was regarded as a disappointing Falstaff. Nightingale saw him as:
a Santa on the skids, dowdy and grouchy, his old arrogance reduced to a sort of seedy vanity and his one-time ebullience to no more than a shrivelled nostalgia for the sack and the sex he now seems scarcely capable of enjoying … his nose is as sharp as a pen, and he always looks likely to begin babbling of green fields.
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4.
Trevor Nunn’s 1979 RSC production with John Woodvine and Ben Kingsley as Ford: “With his pencil-thin moustache and squeezed vowels he is the Elizabethan equivalent of a used-car salesman … particularly brilliant at playing his disguised scenes with Falstaff on a note of wheezy jollity and then releasing manic screams of rage.”
So yet again, the comic honors went to Ford, here played by Ben Kingsley:
With his pencil-thin moustache and squeezed vowels he is the Elizabethan equivalent of a used-car salesman … particularly brilliant at playing his disguised scenes with Falstaff on a note of wheezy jollity and then releasing manic screams of rage the
second the fat knight has left the room … [he] builds to a marvellous pitch of cuckolded rage and is the only Ford I have seen to fling the dirty washing out of the buck-basket not once but twice.
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Susan Tracy as “a lascivious-eyed Mrs Ford”
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and Jane Downs as Mrs. Page were “merry enough but perhaps a little too wise and self-confident,” though this was “more than offset by a randy and truculent Mrs. Quickly (Lila Kaye) who … seem[ed] to enjoy herself as much as the audience … eye-winking, glib-tongued [and] salacious.”
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Bill Alexander continued the tradition of detailed social realism, but made the radical choice to update the play sharply, setting it not in the 1590s but in the “You’ve never had it so good” 1959 world of the “New Elizabethans.” The decision proved a triumphant success: “a terrific show”;
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“merry from start to finish … another hit”;
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“Bard in the Supermac age … The joke is carried off with thoroughness and wit.”
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William Dudley’s clever symbolic set with its “witty and striking series of period interiors”
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made the most of the RST’s technical resources: exploiting the revolve with “virtuosity … sets waltzing in and out of sight as though at the behest of some master choreographer,”
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as isolated self-propelled items of scenery rotated on to suggest a 1950s suburban semi “complete with bay window, cocktail cabinet, and radiogram,”
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or a “roadhouse Tudor” Garter Inn
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with mahogany paneling, dartboard, and “Diana Dors-type barmaid.”
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Shallow and Slender arrived in an open-top Morris, chauffeured by Simple; the wives exchanged letters under paired hair dryers, in what became the show’s iconic image; as for Herne’s Oak, “the tree, in one of the show’s most brilliant jokes, [was] a victim of Corporation bureaucracy. Peter Jeffrey’s discomfited knight [had] a mere stump on which to relax his haunches and receive the jocund wives.”
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The cast played their roles with gusto: “The excellent Peter Jeffrey as Falstaff, a florid party with shifty eyes, a handlebar moustache,
breeches and yellow waistcoat, suggesting a minor public school and a murky war record [was] fruity and raucously funny,”
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though perhaps younger and with less embonpoint than most Falstaffs. Nicky Henson’s Ford, full of “sheer fury” and “humorous invention” in all the expected ways, also threw interesting “fresh light” on the character by revealing genuine though insecure love for his wife, playing Ford as “passionate rather than [just] farcical.”
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“The Merry Wives themselves were played with marvellous panache by Janet Dale and Lindsay Duncan. Gossiping under the hairdryer … giggling over gins on the sofa … or acting out their ‘overheard’ dialogue … they were sharp, subtle and inventive.”
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But despite this praise, Nicholas Shrimpton had reservations: “They suffered nonetheless from a deep-rooted uncertainty. Were they wise and sympathetic heroines … or were they satirical portraits of grossly vulgar, bourgeois housewives? The actresses were not sure, as a consequence, neither was the audience.” Vulgar they certainly were, Bill Alexander himself admits: “In 1600 you could portray [the wives] as jolly and warm-hearted, whereas I’ve portrayed them as spiky and rather tasteless, quite cruel in their judgement.”
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In the smaller roles, there was “a superb Doctor Caius from David Bradley [playing] consistently against the stereotype of the inflammable Frenchman”
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and an excellent performance from “Bruce Alexander as a pulpit-hungry Welsh cleric,”
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but for Stanley Wells “the abiding delight of the production [was] Sheila Steafel’s Mistress Quickly, a down-at-heel little figure of faded and bibulous gentility, incorrigibly helpful, touchingly delighted with any rewards that [might] come her way, succoured through life’s trickier passages by a hip-flask, bemused by the antics of the stage furnishings, and finally, a squiffy Fairy Queen who [had] lost her way to the party.”
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Her eventual arrival at Herne’s Oak as the others departed was this production’s parting tragicomic moment.