First Transmitted 28th December 1982
Richard Griffiths tries his moves. Too bad they all know he's an idiot. |
Director: David Jones
Oh dear. If ever there was a production to be shown to
people to convince them that, y’know, this series is not for them it would be
this one. As so often in this series, when the comedy comes calling, the series
is reduced to looking dull, stretched and old fashioned, here with gurning
actors and much forced jollity pulling us towards a seemingly long distant
conclusion. I’ve tackled the problems of bringing Shakespeare comedy from stage
to screen earlier when discussing Twelfth Night. Here all
the problems of this genre on screen come together with a brutal force.
First and foremost this is a painfully long production of
what is a very slight and let’s be honest, a rather tedious play. Did something
as slight as Merry Wives deserve an
almost three hour run time? Can a production in which nearly all the actors
seem to be keen to stress how stupid their characters are, hold our attention
for so long? What we get here is something so old fashioned it could have been
around since the 19th century, and so dull that you’ll actually want
to stop it and paint your walls so that you have something more entertaining to
watch afterwards.
Of course a lot of the problems here lie with the play
itself. Legend has it that Elizabeth I herself requested a play to see “Sir
John” in love. If true, then this must be one of the first surviving examples
of a play written for commission rather than the author himself actually
wanting to write it. Crammed with feeble jokes, lame set pieces and obvious
humour, Merry Wives doesn’t even feel
like a “Falstaff” play – certainly not the Falstaff seen in Henry IV. As Harold Bloom put it, it’s
almost like Shakespeare was ashamed of what he was doing and wanted to keep his
creation away from this train wreck.
However, with the BBC committed to giving us the full text,
there is no tightening of the production, no cutting of unnecessary fat from
the bones, no trimming for pace to keep the slight plot moving forward. Instead
scenes stretch on almost to the crack of doom. There is some mild rearrangement
of the text, but the listlessness of the construction of the production and the
strange lack of urgency throughout the film (despite so much furious mugging, it
never feels like there is any rush to get anywhere) mean it just doesn’t grip
the audience at all. I caved on this one. Sorry – I want to watch them all the
way through, really I do. But man oh man this was so flipping, head bashingly
dull and turgidly unfunny I had to watch some in fast forward. I cycled to work
the other day and my bicycle fell apart, including the wheel falling off. Cost
a fortune to fix and I walked to work. That was four times funnier than this
crap.
Part of the problem of this listlessness can be found in the
central performance of Richard Griffiths. His Falstaff is a childish idiot. No
other way of really putting it. Of course it’s part of the play’s problem that
Falstaff is a terminally stupid character who seems to believe virtually
everything he is told, no matter how outlandish. What Griffiths is not is witty
or charismatic or – strangely – energised. At key moments it feels like his
performance is going to let rip into posturing, boasting, rage or frustration:
but it never does. He always returns to a level, cool delivery of the lines, a
low-key, gentle rendition of the knight as almost a worldly innocent. It’s a
legitimate interpretation, but for a play that borders on a farce, having a
central character who seems so slow and underpowered makes Falstaff quite a
tedious figure, who seems to diminish in importance in the play. Griffiths as a
performer seems more like a natural Bottom (and lord knows he would have done
better than Brian Glover in the role) or a Sir Andrew Aguecheek - a dreamer rather than the scheming rogue
Falstaff tries to be in this play.
But then perhaps Griffiths brings it down because Ben
Kingsley is determined to leave nothing in the changing room as Ford. Kingsley
was a highly praised Ford on stage a few years before this was filmed with the
RSC. Now, coming to the production a few months before he was to hoist aloft an
Oscar for Gandhi, he clearly decided to repeat the performance, with no
alteration, for the camera – letting rip as if the back of the stalls still
needed to be reached. On stage I can imagine it was gripping, but on camera
it’s simply overwhelming as every oversized gesture and vocal tic is
practically forced down the eyeball of the viewer. In fact, the impression that
is created is that Kingsley is keen to let us the viewer know that he far
smarter than his stupid character – as if Ford was someone he was holding at
arm’s length like an exhibit, rather than as a living, breathing person.
This is pretty much the case for every other male performance
in the play: aim big, aim high, aim dumb. Let’s laugh at each character in
turn, as if this was a Shakespearean Hi-de-Hi.
When even seasoned actors like Michael Bryant get in on the act then you know
you are in trouble. Alan Bennett can count his lucky stars that a bizarre wig
and beard render him almost completely unrecognisable (bar the famous voice) as
Shallow (in fact it feels like he just wants to get the whole thing over and
done with). Can you even begin to relate to any of these idiots? With no
straight man or sense of reality hanging over anything, how can you care about
what happens? Where is the intelligence of a Feste or the depth of a Benedick?
So the people who come out of this well are the women.
Prunella Scales and Judy Davis make a good fist of the scheming wives,
revelling in their deceptions. Davis in particular has a minxy glee that is
very alluring and what energy this production has is almost completely down to
her. The stand out performance though is Elizabeth Spriggs – mainly because she
is practically the only performer in the play that seems to want to treat her
character with some measure of respect, and who seems to suggest some
intelligence exists in her. Her selfishness and sharpness as she cons virtually
every other character in the play, makes her actually interesting and one of
the few performers the audience can root for.
This parade of grotesques are led through their paces in a series of duff
comedic set pieces, nearly all of which go on far too long to be either impressive,
amusing or really watchable. David Jones seems to have little natural flair for
comedy, confusing loud for funny and dumb for charming. Where he does seem
comfortable is throwing money up onto the screen with an impressive interior
set and location that recreates the look and feel of Shakespeare’s Stratford,
each house taking on an elaborate interior that reflects different elements of
Shakespeare’s birthplace. The exterior locations – big fields and village
squares – are much less convincing, but that’s about par for the course for the
series. So it is impressive to look at, and the camerawork to explore this set
is well done.
But the actual scenes themselves aren’t. Throw on top of
that a terribly slow and mis-shaped staging of the final deception scene. Why
in the name of all that is holy the costume designer decided to go for a Ku
Klux Klan look for the child fairies is a complete mystery. In fact, the final
sequence plays like a rather sinister build-up to a lynching, as if Wicker Man style, these villagers were
preparing to sacrifice the poor fat knight in some pagan rite rather than have
a bit of fun at his expense. Needless to say, the scene is about as funny and
engaging as getting your hand slammed in a door.
So there you go. A director with little eye for comedy lets
a lot of actors rip with barely any control with a script that is not very good
in a production that reverentially stretches out over nearly three hours. The
one or two moments that are amusing are totally lost within this morass of
tedium. Why this really doesn’t work in the end is that there is no warmth
here, no sense of affection for the characters. They are merely jokes and
punchlines, not human beings. There is no sense of respect for them in the actors
or the directors. Baldrick may be an idiot, but Tony Robinson has both respect
and affection for him in his performance: the actors here just think these
characters are almost beneath their interest.
And I don’t just blame David Jones and the cast. I put one
of the largest fingers at you Shakespeare. This is crappy hackwork at best, as
if Salman Rushdie tried to write a farce, but still wanted to us to know he was
the smartest man in the room, rather than caring whether we enjoyed it or not.
So welcome then to one of the worst films in the series, married to one of the
worst scripts Shakespeare ever wrote. Poor, poor, poor stuff.
Conclusion
Another total duffer of a comedy though you can’t polish a
turd if you are going to treat it as if it has literally dropped on your head
from heaven. Elizabeth Spriggs alone probably emerges with reputation fully
intact. Everyone else just looks happy to have got out of a contractual
obligation – kinda like the Bard himself. Not good.
NEXT TIME: Back on the history treadmill with the first part of the Henry VI trilogy.
Just working my way through all 37 DVDs at the moment, and the Merry Wives of Windsor is my 31st. I had not long finished watching the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III a couple of weeks ago, so it was quite a pleasant surprise to see Ron Cook pop up here in a comedy play as a completely different character.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw Mistress Quickly, played by Elizabeth Spriggs, I immediately thought that the actress looked and sounded very familiar, then I realised she was The Witch from Simon and the Witch.
I wish I could see Michael Bryant in this now
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