MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
Upstairs at the Gatehouse

IT usually isn’t very difficult to find contemporary relevance in a Shakespeare play.
But the antics of the merry wives in this apolitical farce are about as far away from the nation’s thoughts as is humanly possible.
The trouble is no one’s feeling very merry.
But that is not the fault of Wylde Thyme Productions who must be thinking exactly the same thing.
After seeing Falstaff in Henry IV, Queen Elizabeth commissioned Shakespeare to write a play about her favourite character in love.
He came up with this middle-class romp where the scheming fat Knight gets duped and duped again.
Jealous husbands see the error of the ways: “Wives may be merry, but honest too.”
Director Stephen Jameson has set the play in 1950s England.
Only in the past few decades have directors been bold enough to bring the scripts out of Renaissance England and into the present.
So it is interesting to think what earlier directors might have made of the plays had they the foresight to give them a contemporary relevance.
What fun they and the audiences could have had with all that jive.
Jameson’s production makes up for lost time. He chose the 1950s to engage a younger audience.
On the surface this is a good idea but give young people some credit. The music certainly livened things up. But the relentless stress on Shakespeare’s dire innuendo, irritatingly done in the Carry On style, felt crass at the best of times.
Every single sexual connotation – of which there are hundreds – was blown out of proportion with a whistle and an “oo matron” gawp.
This is the sort of thing that will confirm youthful misconceptions of Shakespeare rather than break them down.
But you have to hand it to Jameson for pure audacity – the final forest scene, where Falstaff is given the fright of his life, saw a Mummy, Frankenstein, Cleopatra and a Werewolf dancing on stage to Elvis.
Theoretically interesting, practically irritating.

Until July 18
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