The Merry Wives of Windsor
The fat knight Sir John Falstaff imagines that Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are both taken with him and so, attracted as much by their husbands’ money as their personal charms, he decides to woo them both. But the women are up to the old lecher’s tricks and turn the tables on him with a series of humiliating assignations, midnight terrors and a very damp, extremely smelly laundry basket. Gutsy, colloquial and bustling with vivid characters, The Merry Wives of Windsor is a brilliantly constructed farce and the only comedy Shakespeare set in his native land. It is also the ancestor of English bourgeois comedy and gave birth to a tradition that reaches down to the modern TV sitcom. The production made merry with the relationship between the life of middle-class Elizabethan England and the late medieval period in which the play is set.
Directed by Christopher Luscombe
Cast
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Christopher Benjamin Sir John Falstaff - Serena Evans Mistress Page
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Andrew Havill Master Ford -
Gerard McCarthy Master Fenton -
Sarah Woodward Mistress Ford -
Nathan Amzi Peter Simple -
Gareth Armstrong Evans -
William Belchambers Master Slender - Philip Bird Dr. Caius
- Ceri-lyn Cissone Anne Page
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Barnaby Edwards John Rugby - Peter Gale Justice Shallow
Make it a double feature
4h 35m together
The Merry Wives of Windsor
RSC Live: Twelfth Night
Both from Christopher Luscombe.
