The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park 
The Merry Wives of Windsor has had a bad press over the years. Many Victorian critics decried it for its cruelty to Falstaff and it's never been widely performed.
According to popular belief, the play was written when Queen Elizabeth desired to see Falstaff in love. Of course, if this were true, she'd have been bitterly disappointed as, in the play, he only pretends to be in love. In reality, he's that most archetypal of characters, a man on the make (something that the Queen could probably have identified with even more readily).
But then the themes of the play are for all places and for all times. Really, every device is here: the jealous husband, the scheming wives, the old drunk, the comic foreigners and the silly youths. This really was a sitcom for Elizabethan times; close one's eyes when Ford is in a jealous rage and one sees Basil Fawlty railing at the world and surely, Slender in all his idiocy, is an ancestor of Bertie Wooster. Alan Strachan's production wrings every laugh out of the play and the cast responds magnificently.
Pre-eminent is Robert Lang's Falstaff, a saloon bar bore of the first order. One would think that anyone who is so comprehensively tricked would have learned a lesson and desisted from laying siege to Susie Blake's manipulating Mistress Ford but where Lang succeeds so well is by playing Falstaff as someone with complete belief in his own charms and irresistibility to women - and of course, that makes his downfall even funnier.
But everyone shines in this cast, Christopher Goodwin's Dr Caius magnificently mangles the English language (the puns are awful but one can't help laughing), Michael Tudor Barnes' Sir Hugh Evans is the pompous Welsh parson - although his English is too good for someone who supposedly 'makes fritters out of English'. Paul Raffield's Ford, just verges on the right side of haminess in his jealousy but never convinces in his supposed contrition - this is a Ford that is on short fuse and ready to blow again.
The Regent's Park theatre is a perfect backdrop to this play (particularly in the fairy scene at the end). All in all, this is a great night out.
Maxwell Cooter
