The Merry Wives of Windsor (Series 5 Episode 2)

First Transmitted 28th December 1982

Richard Griffiths tries his moves. Too bad they all know he's an idiot.

Cast: Richard Griffiths (Sir John Falstaff), Judy Davis (Mistress Ford), Ben Kingsley (Ford), Prunella Scales (Mistress Page), Elizabeth Spriggs (Mistress Quickly), Michael Bryant (Dr. Caius), Alan Bennett (Justice Shallow), Tenniel Evans (Sir Hugh Evans), Simon Chandler (Fenton), Richard O’Callaghan (Slender), Bryan Marshall (Page), Nigel Terry (Pistol), Michael Graham Cox (Host), Gordon Gostelow (Bardolph), Michael Robbins (Nym), Ron Cook (Simple)

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 19^th 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.