The Merry Wives of Windsor

Never have I felt quite so much like firing a surface-to-air missile.  My enjoyable afternoon at Shakespeare's Globe, and that of hundreds of others, was spoiled by a ballet of circling helicopters which at times hovered right over the theatre.  At first I thought it was just the Met looking for a Brazilian electrician to bump off, but apparently they were not guilty.  It was aerial filming.  I rather suspect something to do with the BBC and Andrew Marr, but I may be wrong.  BBC television is immutably hostile to Shakespeare and all his works, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were using part of the licence fee to ruin our afternoon's theatregoing.

Apart from that, I really enjoyed the play.  Along with Galton and Simpson, Clement and Le Fresnais, Perry and Croft and Cleese and Booth, Shakespeare can claim on the evidence of this play to be one of the great sitcom writers.  The BBC would no doubt dismiss Merry Wives as not edgy enough to be commissioned, and Windsor as hideously southern and middle class.  'Can't we make it Desperate Wives of Salford?'  I was delighted to see that the programme note acknowledges the historical tradition linking Shakespeare's comedy writing to that of modern British television.  One or two of the actors in this play had clearly been watching Fawlty Towers, particularly Andrew Havill as Frank Ford, who seemed to be Basil Fawlty's next of kin.   His wife Alice, played by Sarah Woodward, made no attempt to turn herself into Sybil, but was equally good.  I particularly enjoyed the laundrybasket scene involving her, Christopher Benjamin as Falstaff, and Serena Evans as Meg Page.  This was old-fashioned comedy acting of the highest calibre, enhanced by the openness of the Globe stage.  I particularly enjoyed seeing the way Sue Wallace as Mistress Quickly mastered the gift, essential to success at the Globe, of delivering her lines with one eye on the other actors and the other on the audience.  I've only seen this play once before, in a fairly lacklustre RSC version at the Old Vic about six years ago, which was notable mainly for Greg Hicks' extraordinarily funny Frenchman Dr Caius.  As well as terrific acting there are excellent costumes by Janet Bird, who has dreamed up some authentically pagan outfits involving straw for the final scene around Herne's oak.  And the music is effective too.  I've seldom seen a Globe audience go out looking so happy as they did after this show.

My only reservation concerns the set.  Like a lot of the productions at the Globe under Dominic Dromgoole, there is a very extensive extra stage which comes out into the yard and which hosts a lot of the key scenes.  Very good if you're a groundling like me, but hopeless if you're in the back row of the upper tier, where spectators can't see what's going on without standing up.  Did the director Christopher Luscombe check the sightlines before building it?  If he did and went ahead anyway, I think that shows a certain disrespect for the audience.  Not as much disrespect as was shown by the helicopters overhead, but not something I think should be encouraged.