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.

Cast

Christopher Benjamin

Sir John Falstaff

Serena Evans

Mistress Page

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

Barnaby Edwards

John Rugby

Peter Gale

Justice Shallow