It never occurred to me before, but as I watched John Hodgkinson’s braggadocious Falstaff, I was reminded of a 30-stone Lothario who was once a work colleague. Charming, audacious and snappily dressed, like Shakespeare’s antihero, he too was to suffer a certain degree of humiliation as a result of his paramours.
It was probably the setting that brought him to mind, not in Tudor times, but in the suburbs of what would now be part of the blue wall of Berkshire, an Alan Ayckbourn mockery of manners written half a millennium before Alan Ayckbourn.
Hodgkinson is terrific, an old trouper in every sense, with stentorian haughtiness as he abuses Ford or bemoans his own mistreatment, always with the timing of an Olympian fencer.
It helps the absurd comedy that he towers above the other actors when disguised, Edna Everidge style, as a pinch-stepping witch of Brainford, but other highlights are pure invention, as he miaows sexily at his intended conquest, Fosbury flops into her linen basket to avoid detection by her husband and later downs two pints in two gulps to recover his spirits. I doubt my university yard-of-ale champion could have done better.
Had there been a #MeToo movement back in 1597 when Shakespeare wrote the play, Samantha Spiro’s forthright Meg Page would probably have been its founder. Her scream has the power of a fire alarm, and she is a clearly woman with self-possession to have the courage to belch loudly if it serves to cover an outburst by our fat friend from within his hiding place. And Alice Ford, the alluring Siubhan Harrison, would surely have been her first enthusiastic recruit, eager to put her unwanted suitor in his place—in this case the muddy Thames.
Richard Goulding is Frank Ford, horn-mad, growling, panting and eaten by insane jealousy, and among a strong supporting cast, Patrick Walshe McBride is a loose-limbed, gawky, haw-hawing Slender, with Jason Thorpe and Ian Hughes as the stock comic Frenchman Dr Caius and Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans and Emily Houghton as the match-making, self-serving Host of the Garter.
The play takes a little time to get going, arguably with too many minor characters (several of whom Arrigo Boito eliminated when he wrote the libretto for Verdi’s opera Falstaff), but the pace of the comedy accelerates after the interval—almost enough in fact to distract the three young women beside me to look up from their mobile phones.
Blanche McIntyre’s production features an impressive set by Robert Innes Hopkins, with a central hexagonal revolve for the Garter Inn and Ford’s house and a lovely, magical representation of the forest scene around the Herne Oak. Presenting Caius’s quarters as a dental practice seemed awkward and out of context, however, and seemed to have been introduced for a single equipment gag.
Events unfold in the context of a football match between England and Germany—to be broadcast at the pub on the deliciously-named Pie Sport—which neither adds to nor detracts from the production as a whole. More of a problem for me was that Falstaff’s hangers-on seem much too civil, much too youthful to be sufficiently dissolute—although Slender seems charmingly happy to have mistakenly married one of them and ended up with a rather nice young man.