Taking the plunge

Shakespeare’s ill-advised reimagining of Falstaff as a buffoon at large in Windsor has always been fair game for adaptation. The story goes that he wrote The Merry Wives in response to Queen Elizabeth’s wish to see Sir John in love. The fee may have been a good one and the Bard actually subverts the wish (if that’s what it was) in showing the fat knight more enamoured of the wives’ money than of their good selves. Such pleasure as there’s to be had in the play has to do with its picture of life in an English provincial town (a far cry from the exotic locations of the other comedies). French doctors and Welsh pastors are tolerated for their care of bodies and souls but are otherwise the butts of xenophobic mirth.

It’s a play that’s always responded well to being thrown around a bit. Catherine the Great translated it into Russian in 1786, shifting Windsor to St Petersburg and cleverly making Falstaff a dandy returned from abroad and mocked for his Frenchified ways. There’ve been at least nine operas, Verdi’s late masterpiece way ahead of Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849), Vaughan Williams’s Greensleevian Sir John in Love (1929), and the rest of the field.

The play itself does call for songs, and many of the adaptations are fired by the entirely reasonable assumption that music can lift the creaky text on to a higher plane. No need to tiptoe reverently around the words, just to plunge in and have fun. For the music, director Gregory Doran calls in the appropriately named Paul Englishby (credits including incidental music for many RSC productions and the orchestration for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) and for the lyrics, Ranjit Bolt. The most interesting feature of Doran’s treatment, otherwise generally faithful to Shakespeare’s words, is reconnecting this island of a play to the Falstaffian mainland by adding in a reminiscence of Sir John’s abortive dalliance with Mistress Quickly in Henry IV, Part 1.