The early scenes of Philip Breen’s
revival are often marked by one of the most unsettling species of
theatrical moments: the un-sound of a joke not being got. True, much
Shakespearean humour is now badly dated (all those malapropisms, for
instance, palpably in evidence in this play), but the majority of it
clearly remains serviceable. Too frequently, however, Breen’s
supporting players – especially Calum Findlay’s gormless suitor Slender
– simply don’t sell the gags. It is as if they have misunderstood a
direction to take their characters seriously, and instead of grounding
the comedy they discharge it to earth.
The principals, at least, are all in fine fettle. Desmond Barrit’s
generously padded Falstaff thinks himself the height of urbanity as he
attempts for mercenary reasons to seduce Mistresses Page and Ford; he
is the spirit of Leslie Phillips in the body of Orson Welles. (As the
saying goes, inside every fat person there’s a thin person with a lot
of room.) Sylvestra Le Touzel’s Mistress Page is a wry Sloaney type
(this
is Windsor, after all),
and Alexandra Gilbreath’s Mistress Ford possesses the vivacious
animation of face and voice which this actress brought to Rosalind in
the RSC’s
As You Like It a
decade ago. These two, but especially Gilbreath’s Ford, fully inhabit
the title’s description of them. The figure of Mistress Quickly is
underused by Shakespeare in this play (paradoxically, she cuts a fuller
comic figure in the histories), so Anita Dobson gets a slightly raw
deal, but you wouldn’t think it to watch her assured performance. And
the pathologically jealous Frank Ford is exactly the kind of
exaggeratedly vexed character at which John Ramm excels. Even Paddy
Cunneen’s score throbs with an English woodwind eccentricity.
Yet, having assembled such a fine comic crew, Breen keeps stalling
matters. He hobbles the pace by cutting the final-act masque only
slightly and leaving the tedious Latin-grammar scene wholly in place,
and then falls prey to the modish taste for pointing up the darker,
uncomfortable elements of Shakespeare’s comic resolutions... a move
both rash and difficult with a piece as throwaway as
Merry Wives. I can understand his
desire to use a full palette, but in the event – especially at either
end of the canvas – the colours keep running together into beige.
Written for the Financial
Times.