Globe’s Slim Falstaff: A Half-Fat Hero in a Less Merry Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives Of Windsor (Shakespeare’s Globe)

Verdict: Moderately merry

Rating:

A BIT like the epic operas of Richard Wagner, Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives Of Windsor has some great moments… and very long half hours.

It’s the one about Sir Jack Falstaff, the would-be sexual interloper with a very unfavourable body mass index, and a waistline ‘two yards about’.

He is, as he says himself, ‘as subject to heat as butter’. And we can all relate to that right now.

Fancying his chances with a couple of Windsor wives, Mistresses Page and Ford, our Jack is thrilled to his codpiece when he appears to pull both.

But the ladies plan to teach Falstaff a lesson, while Mistress Ford’s jealous husband Frank secretly hopes to catch him in flagrante delicto.

The wicker man: Falstaff (George Fouracres) is tricked into hiding in a laundry hamper, by Mistress Page (Emma Pallant, above) and Mistress Ford (Katherine Pearce)

Awkwardly out of step with modern tastes, thanks to its period appetite for comic humiliation and body shaming, Sean Holmes’s cheerful new production gets around the problem by casting a trim and handsome George Fouracres in a fat suit as Falstaff.

And he’s dressed in a gorgeous liturgical red doublet and hose, to make him stick out like a sore thumb. It may be cheating, but Fouracres augments his jowls with a herbaceous beard, and employs a large and lascivious range of comic eye rolls.

The wives themselves (Emma Pallant as Mrs Page and Katherine Pearce as Mrs Ford) could be merrier in their subterfuge. But Pallant is compromised by the fact she actually carries a torch for ginormous Jack.

Jolyon Coy is more fun as Mr Ford, whose plans to trap Falstaff repeatedly rebound on him.

A face in the crowd: Falstaff (George Fouracres) mixes with the ‘groundlings’ at the Globe

Larger than life: Director Sean Holmes gets round the problem of body shaming in Merry Wives by casting a slim actor, George Fouracres, and putting him in a fat suit

Excruciating subplots pass in a blur of regional accents and false beards.

Cutting half an hour would be a small mercy — especially the random Welsh parson teaching grammar.

But the set design of Liberty print wallpaper and matching costumes is easy on the eye, and the physical comedy just about gets us over the line.

The Merry Wives Of Windsor is on at Shakespeare’s Globe until September 20. 

Noughts & Crosses (Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park)

Verdict: Nought great

Rating:

Noughts & Crosses is a sadly bovine adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s dystopian young adults’ novel, inspired by Romeo and Juliet.

Black oligarchs rule a segregated society where white people are bitterly oppressed.

Here, the daughter of the deputy PM, Sephy (Corinna Brown), falls for white schoolmate Callum (Noah Valentine), only for him to get mixed up with freedom fighters.

First seen at the RSC in 2007, adapted by incoming Almeida Theatre boss Dominic Cooke, the melodramatic story does move at a decent lick.

But where Shakespeare illuminated his tale with sunlit poetry, this is a prosaic parody of white power.

Callum’s downtrodden, working-class family feel like a campaign case study for the BNP. Not Blackman’s intention, I’m sure.

Romeo & Juliet lite: Corinna Brown (Sephy) and Noah Valentine (Callum) in Noughts & Crosses

Brown is a vivacious young Sephy: bolshy yet bashful. And Valentine’s loyal young Callum is streetwise, yet sensitive.

But Tinuke Craig’s production includes 16 other 2D stiffs, on what looks like a firefighters’ practice ground of concrete turrets and rusty stairwells.

And with actors expressing themselves by knocking over chairs, I was all too glad to escape into the balmy night, and Regent’s Park.

Noughts & Crosses runs at the Open Air Theatre until July 26.

Wilko: Love And Death And Rock ‘n’ Roll (Leicester Square Theatre)

Verdict: Electric 

Rating:

Dr Feelgood’s feisty former guitarist Wilko Johnson (real name John Wilkinson), who passed away three years ago, may just have found the perfect final resting place: an underground theatre off Leicester Square.

No doubt he’d have preferred something seedier. But with many of the Seventies rocker’s fans now well into their pensions, they at least will be glad of some of the West End’s most comfortable seats.

From these, they can enjoy a show, written by Jonathan Maitland, that is half play, half gig.

It first aired in Hornchurch last year — a much more sophisticated setting for Wilko’s off-the-wall life story.

Half play, half gig: Johnson Willis as Wilko Johnson, with Georgina Fairbanks as Irene 

He grew up after the War with a hostile father, a love of blues guitar, and a teenage sweetheart called Irene who stuck by him through rock-n-roll thick, and drug-fuelled thin and went on to be his wife.

The punk guitarist’s punk guitarist, Johnson was admired by everyone from Bob Geldof to Paul Weller. Even Roger Daltrey, of The Who, recorded an album with him in 2014, when he was already supposed to be pushing up daisies after a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. That turned out to be wrong, by the way…but that’s another extraordinary Wilko story.

Refitted for the West End venue, Maitland’s play is now fired more equally by Johnson’s exploits and his music. Songs include He Did It Right, a burst of Milk And Alcohol (released by Dr Feelgood after Wilko’s departure from the band and hence a huge irritant to the man), and a dip into the Daltrey days.

Most memorable, though, is Johnson Willis’s performance as Wilko.

Willis, who gives the guitarist an even shriller Canvey Island whine than the real McCoy, goes big on Wilko’s poetic aspirations as a former student of English literature. But he also gives an excellent representation of Johnson’s live guitar playing, which one friend of mine lucky enough to witness it described, with awe, as simply ‘electrifying’.

Watch out for a roster of guest stars including Jon Otway, Billy Bragg and Wreckless Eric.

Until July 27 (leicestersquaretheatre.com).