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by William Shakespeare, directed by Frank Galati

Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

May 30-October 14, 2011

The clock on stage Stratford’s new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor stays stuck at 10:10 throughout the play even though the play depends so much on about exactly when and where people meet.  Why have the clock except for the one  instance when it tells the right time?  This is just one of numerous botched details, large and small, that make Wives much less enjoyable than it should be.

Wives is one of Shakespeare’s least profound plays, coming about as close to pure farce as his early play The Comedy of Errors.  What farces may lack in profundity they make up for in theatricality, and here the detailing of the action rises to the highest level of importance.  Here, also, is exactly where American director Frank Galati lets the show down.  Galati may be famous for his work with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, but he never directed Shakespeare there.  He fails to shape the action so that it climaxes with the scene at Herne’s Oak and he fails to define the characters fully. 

The latter is most noticeable with the Falstaff of Geraint Wyn Davies.  Wyn Davies may be one of our finest actors, but Galati seems to have left him and many other actors to fend for themselves in creating their characters.  Thus, Wyn Davies’ Falstaff is very much like the Dylan Thomas, Welsh accent and all, of his one-man show Do Not Go Gentle combined with his Welsh Bottom of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2009.  The Welsh accent is especially inappropriate since Falstaff specifically makes fun of the Welsh accent of Hugh Evans.  Into the mix Wyn Davies adds a bit of W.C. Fields and a lot of Benny Hill.  Nevertheless, Wyn Davies can speak Shakespeare so well that Falstaff’s soliloquies and accounts of his adventures to Mr. Brook are still very funny--as long as you don’t think of him as Falstaff.  It doesn’t help that designer Robert Perdziola has given him the worst fat suit I’ve ever seen--large around the middle but nowhere else--so that Falstaff look more like Toad of Toad Hall than an obese human being.

Another key figure left adrift is Janet Wright as Mistress Quickly.  The character is willing to pass identical love letters to both Mistress Ford and Mistress Page and is willing to help all tree suitors for the hand of Anne Page, but what lies behind her actions?  Is she slyly mercenary or merely dotty?  Wright gives us no clue and as a result the humour of the character is lost.

The ever-jealous Francis Ford is the most important male character next to Falstaff.  Galati does have Tom Rooney gradate his expressions of jealously from controlled anger to near lunacy, but he fails to highlight the mania of Ford’s obsession from the first.  How is it Ford has a disguise so readily to hand?  Has he used it before?  (And, to the designer, “Why does it look like it was made from an old carpet?”)  In the last 25 years, no one has been better in this role than Colm Feore in 1990, who seemed like a seething cauldron ready to boil over at any moment.  Rooney can’t muster the same agony Feore’s Ford went through in hearing of his wife’s assignations from Falstaff’s mouth.  Besides this, Galati adds a bit of business, Ford getting his hand stuck in Falstaff’s cognac glass, that actually impedes the vitality of the Ford’s scene with the laundry hamper since Ford can use only one hand to fling out the laundry. 

Given the generally slack direction, those who fare best are the ones with the most experience in acting Shakespeare.  James Blendick, who played Falstaff in the 1990 production, lights up the stage with his every appearance and gets more out of Shallow’s few words here and there than Wyn Davies or Rooney do with their long speeches.  Andrew Gillies is a pleasure throughout as Hugh Evans, a character who seems to embody the dopey innocence of a play where everyone must eventually acknowledge himself a fool.  Tom McCamus, who played Ford when Stratford last staged the play in 1995, is reliable and authoritative as George Page.  It’s a pity he wasn’t allowed to reprise his Ford, since in stage presence and voice he so clearly eclipses Rooney and he is so adept at acting obsession.

Laura Condlln as Mistress Page and Lucy Peacock as Mistress Ford both play their roles well, although making Page rational and Ford slightly silly has a downside since Mistress Ford suffers the most from her husband’s jealousy and ought to be granted more dignity.  Randy Hughson does well as the jolly Host, but Galati does nothing to point out his symbolic function in the play as the spirit of hospitality and  reconciler of conflicts.  Abigail Winter-Culliford is excellent as usual as Falstaff’s page Robin, but Galati fails to underline how Robin, like Prince Hal, in the history plays, drifts away from the malign influence of Falstaff for the benign realm of society as embodied by the two wives.  Many of the younger company member are very weak, like Christopher Prentice as the numbskull Slender.  The notable exception is Trent Pardy as Fenton, who speaks Shakespeare with clarity and understanding.

Perdziola has moved the setting forward to the early Victorian period for no particular purpose and had devised quite unremarkable sets and costumes.  He seems to run out of imagination by the time of the Herne’s Oak scene just when he should be most creative given all the oufs and fairies he has to dress.  Having Mistress Quickly’s Queen of the Fairies look like Queen Victoria would be funny if we hadn’t see it before.  Alan Brodie’s lighting is best at creating the warm glow of the tavern and the decent of a multitude of Chinese lanterns during the Herne’s Oak scene is the the single most magical thing about it. 

For me, the best production of Wives at Stratford is still the one directed by Bernard Hopkins in 1990.  Blendick’s Falstaff, Feore’s Ford and the homemade fairy costumes of the children are still clear in my mind.  That production made each trick played on Falstaff bigger in its effect rather than climaxing with the buck basket scene and going downhill from there as with Galati.  Since Stratford hasn’t stage Wives since 1995, you may wish to see it simply because you missed it before.  Since the play is mostly in prose and set in his own time and country, it is Shakespeare’s clearest reflection of middle class life and speech in his period.  Yet, early on, when you see Wyn Davies’s Falstaff looking like a ball with sticks for legs and arms, you’ll think it’s just a rough sketch of the character and the play, not the real thing.       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Lucy Peacock, Abigail Winter-Culliford, Laura Condlln and Geraint Wyn Davies. ©2011 David Hou.

For Tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.