Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool: The theatre is packed but I am alone. I’m watching the Merry Wives by Shakespeare and am enjoying it.
But I’m not sure how to review it. How do you review a Shakespeare play? Hasn’t it all been said and done before? Shouldn’t you know the great man’s body of work? Seen his plays? Be able to compare them? Be fluent and conversational in their interpretation? Shouldn’t I be highly intelligent, erudite and well-read?
Part of me says I’m unqualified to write this review and another, louder, part of me says “Sod it. This is my blog; I make the rules around here. I don’t care if nobody reads this. I’m not claiming to be an expert but I liked the play and want to write about it.”
But how can I write about the Merry Wives? All I need to say is that it was funny, it’s touring Britain and was produced by The New Vic Theatre, Northern Broadsides and Liverpool Playhouse/Everyman. End of story, end of review, see you later…
My Lightbulb Moment
And then it hit me. I got a concept that will lead me into a proper review: this play is like a soap opera. Is this Shakespeare’s soap opera? It felt like I was watching a period TV drama on the stage; I laughed, I related to the characters and I wanted to see more.
But there was no more, and this is where my theory falls down: a soap opera is a drama that keeps repeating itself. This is a one-off. I’m sure Shakespeare could have written soap operas but thank God he didn’t.
The play’s full title is the Merry Wives of Windsor and it was set in fifteenth century England, two hundred years earlier than when Shakespeare was writing. The producers emphasise this time-lag by setting this version of the play in an earlier time frame from our own – the 1920s.
It is the tale of two wives who are propositioned by Falstaff, a larger-than-life character who turns up in several of Shakespeare’s plays.
We first see Falstaff lounging on a chair and surrounded by a bunch of thugs. First impression is that he’s a small-time Mafioso and this is his gang. But it soon becomes clear that he’s a good-natured buffoon, not a criminal, and his main interest is to get free food, wine and women. He looks like a nobleman who has fallen on hard times, is used to having servants around and has attracted the local thugs to act as his retainers. But he soon falls out with the thugs and they tell the husbands that their wives are the target of Falstaff’s lust. This sets the scene for the drama.
The Wives compare the notes that Falstaff has sent them – short love letters, full of absurd flattery – and decide to lead him on and humiliate him. A great comic scenes follow: Falstaff visits one of the wives at home and, just as he starts to charm her, the other wife comes in and says “your husband is coming!” There is a panic and Falstaff is bundled into a huge clothes hamper, carried outside by the servants and dumped into the river. The exercise is repeated the following day and Falstaff is humiliated and chastened in the process.
Both husbands have been informed that their wives are dallying with Falstaff. One of them doesn’t believe it and is quite relaxed. The other one is a jealous type and he gets furious – this justifies all his suspicions – and, in rampaging around the house in search of the seducer, provides much comic relief.
It all ends happily. There is a reconciliation and the suspicious husband’s fury subsides when he realises his wife was just teaching Falstaff a lesson. He promises to stop being jealous. Falstaff is forgiven, the thugs have been transformed into proper servants and they all go on their merry way.
That’s it. End of review.
The most interesting thing about this play is how contemporary it is. If it were renamed and put on TV I’m sure people wouldn’t think it was out of date. This is remarkable considering that the play is set in England over 600 years ago.
What this tells me is that people don’t change. The world today is very different from how it was in Shakespeare’s day; the level of comfort and security that every British citizen has (but doesn’t necessarily appreciate) would be unrecognisable to The Bard.
Shakespeare’s Merry Wives is a reminder that human behaviour hasn’t changed despite all the technological advances that we have seen over the last 200 years. We still have rich and poor (the thugs are poor, the main characters are rich); some people are immoral and most are not; some are eaten up by suspicion and jealousies but most are not. We still love, hate, lust, scrounge, deceive, hope, lie, cheat and steal.
The fundamentals of human nature haven’t changed and probably never will. I’ve just had another lightbulb moment. I’ve just realised something that every theatre critic probably knew years ago – this is what makes Shakespeare so enduringly popular: He writes about human nature.
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Photo from the Merry Wives at Liverpool’s Playhouse Theatre
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You said” What this tells me is that people don’t change. The world today is very different from how it was in Shakespeare’s day; the level of comfort and security that every British citizen has (but doesn’t necessarily appreciate) would be unrecognisable to The Bard.”
What is causing this level of comfort? And yes we do not appreciate that there would be a good chance of our children and ourselves, suffering, starving, being damaged from things like polio, or Staphylococcus, a drought, a war, all reduced by technology.(yes technology has ended all out war, for obvious reasons) My father had eight other brothers and two sisters, you come from a rather large family. He and 4 of his brothers went to WWII, imagine if you had only ONE child? My mother had ONE orange a year donated by a rich neighbor. Imagine not having shoes? We have all this and much more BECAUSE of technology. Its not all cell phones and computers, its medicine, food, clothing, water, and shelter. ALL of which if you think about it were scarce and hard gotten. Having the abundance of THINGS and our health, and scarcity of children of course CHANGE human nature even the emotional part. Go to any ancient grave yard you will find the graves of two adults and around them many small stones of their children who died young. Children dying young was inevitable, a part of living.
Maybe you should watch “The Mill and the Cross” again, not as Breughel’s religious allegory but as a commentary of his times?
As a biologist I KNOW creatures CHANGE fundamentally, its inevitable, LOOK and you will see.
I think you are wrong about human nature. IT DOES CHANGE! I think…THINK….that yes the emotive parts are still existing. But they is not the ONLY thing that make us “human” We tend to focus on this part of being human, as does Shakespeare. But you yourself in this review mention how technology and thought subsume and obliterate emotion, as is and will be the case. Over time “human nature” has moved from more emotion to less and this process presided over BY TECHNOLOGY is accelerating, and certainly needs to if we want a world that lasts another 400 years. We can no longer afford to be the characters in Shakespeare’s stories.
What an interesting comment and I’m replying immediately which isn’t a good idea as my ideas might mature/change. My first reaction is that we don’t change as we still act out all the same emotions we al pways have done: love, hate, fear, hope etc. If you strip away the smartphones, cars and comfortable homes and look at the way people behave today I really can’t see a difference. We still fall in and out of love, act immorally and vice versa and make the same mistakes. I don’t remember writing “how technology and thought subsume and obliterate emotion” but I do know that the most obsessive smartphone user or gaming addict has really powerful emotions driving him/her along, even if they don’t want to talk to us boring adults. The other big change I see is that people are so much more sensitive these days, especially when it comes to kids; in my youth (1970s) we were left to look after ourselves but nowadays parents and carers hover over kids as if they’re going to be kidnapped if they take their eyes off them. I think this may lead to some profound, and very negative, changes in future generations who, I suspect, will be even more neurotic than we are at present.
Shakespearian Eastenders?
I never read reviews as I have the attention span of a gnat – but read yours to the end – weaving in your thought process adds an interesting dimension and brings it alive ?
Maybe you don’t read reviews because, like me, you don’t want to read superior intellectual musings. Arabella, who left a comment here, told me what a review is. This is something I didn’t know, and it sounds boring… “But what you call a review is the synopsis of the play; a review would comment on the cast’s performances, the lighting, the setting, the direction, the music/sound, etc etc.
I remember seeing this play fifty years ago and not knowing what to make of it then, though I well remember Falstaff in the laundry basket.
I now think that this is the closest he ever came to writing about his own lifestyle ( in spite of the time lapse). Shakespeare was the son of a shopkeeper (a glover) and had little or no experience of the sort of things that most of his plays deal with – murder, battles and the death of kings, but this play is different. It gives another slant to Lord Byron’s famous comment that Shakespeare’s plays are: “exactly the sort of plays I would expect a grocer to write.” The reference to soap opera is a good one.
Thanks for this very enlightening comment. Reminds me of Napoleon’s comment that we are a “Nation of Shopkeepers.” Actually, I just looked that quote up and Wikipedia assures me that Napoleon never actually said it. But Adam Smith did.
The Wikipedia article includes this quote (apparently) from Napoleon, which sounds like it could have been said by Nigel Farage: “Your meddling in continental affairs, and trying to make yourselves a great military power, instead of attending to the sea and commerce, will yet be your ruin as a nation.”
As ever, I like your blatant honesty of your approach. Critics love to wrap their opinions in barbed wire and tinsel but this is the response of an audience member, intelligent but not cynical, well-informed but not expert. But what you call a review is the synopsis of the play; a review would comment on the cast’s performances, the lighting, the setting, the direction, the music/sound, etc etc. However… you said it all in two words: “…it’s funny…” – which is as much of a recommendation as most of us need. Is it worth seeing? I think so, judging from your response. That, and the photo, make me very curious. Were I in the UK any time soon I’d go and see it.
Thanks for this encouraging response and useful advice about how to write a review.
However, I would be unable to comment on “the cast’s performances, the lighting, the setting, the direction, the music/sound, etc etc” due to my ignorance of theatre in general.
Great review. Sorry I missed this production. Just goes to show how great Shakespeare is and was. Human nature at its best and most horrid, depicted beautifully.