The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor

135 mins | Comedy | June 27, 2011

The fat knight Sir John Falstaff imagines that Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are both taken with him and so, attracted as much by their husbands’ money as their personal charms, he decides to woo them both. But the women are up to the old lecher’s tricks and turn the tables on him with a series of humiliating assignations, midnight terrors and a very damp, extremely smelly laundry basket. Gutsy, colloquial and bustling with vivid characters, The Merry Wives of Windsor is a brilliantly constructed farce and the only comedy Shakespeare set in his native land. It is also the ancestor of English bourgeois comedy and gave birth to a tradition that reaches down to the modern TV sitcom. The production made merry with the relationship between the life of middle-class Elizabethan England and the late medieval period in which the play is set.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

135 mins | Comedy | June 27, 2011

The Merry Wives of Windsor
The fat knight Sir John Falstaff imagines that Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are both taken with him and so, attracted as much by their husbands’ money as their personal charms, he decides to woo them both. But the women are up to the old lecher’s tricks and turn the tables on him with a series of humiliating assignations, midnight terrors and a very damp, extremely smelly laundry basket. Gutsy, colloquial and bustling with vivid characters, The Merry Wives of Windsor is a brilliantly constructed farce and the only comedy Shakespeare set in his native land. It is also the ancestor of English bourgeois comedy and gave birth to a tradition that reaches down to the modern TV sitcom. The production made merry with the relationship between the life of middle-class Elizabethan England and the late medieval period in which the play is set.
Producers Shakespeare's Globe
Original title The Merry Wives of Windsor
Directors Christopher Luscombe
Writers William Shakespeare

Cast

Christopher Benjamin

as Sir John Falstaff

Serena Evans

as Mistress Page

Andrew Havill

as Master Ford

Gerard McCarthy

as Master Fenton

Sarah Woodward

as Mistress Ford

Nathan Amzi

as Peter Simple

Gareth Armstrong

as Evans

William Belchambers

as Master Slender

Philip Bird

as Dr. Caius

Ceri-lyn Cissone

as Anne Page

Barnaby Edwards

as John Rugby

Peter Gale

as Justice Shallow

Michael Garner

as Master Page

Paul Woodson

as Pistol

Sue Wallace

as Mistress Quickly