"The Merry Wives of Windsor". Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Are we in a new era of Falstaffs?

In a recent interview in The Times, Ian McKellen said that he’d never ‘got’ Falstaff in the past. The standard, jovial ‘fat-man Toby-jug’ had never struck him as particularly funny or adorable. I felt the same. The Elizabethans’ fondness for this down-at-heel Father Christmas always seemed like something I’d have to accept, rather than experience for myself.

But then McKellen realised that Falstaff is in fact thoroughly objectionable: a liar, a hypocrite, a glutton, a drunk, an emotional manipulator and a thief. It was a revelation. Once he stopped worrying about trying to make the audience love him, and instead embraced the character’s dark side, Falstaff came to life – and, paradoxically, also became more appealing.

John Hodgkinson, in Blanche McIntyre’s hysterically funny and inspired production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, has clearly come to the same conclusion. His Falstaff is never jovial. He cuts a sinister shape. Rather than being a Bunteresque beach ball, he looks more like a wannabe crime kingpin who’s let himself go. He speaks with a tone of measured threat rather than pompous bluster. And he treats his posse of hangers-on like flunkies beneath his notice. When Bardolph asks him if wants an egg in his beer, he replies, ‘I’ll no pullet-sperm in my brewage’ with such utter disdain that he truly doesn’t see the absurdity of the statement. Rather than poking fun at himself, as many Falstaffs do, he believes his own lies. And as a result, the ignominies to which he is subjected by Mistresses Ford and Page – getting covered in dirty underwear, being thrown in the Thames, being beaten up while dressed as an old woman, and finally being pinched by fairies in Windsor Great Park – are hilarious. By the end, you have to love him, not because he’s lovable, but because watching him suffer is simply so bloody enjoyable.

Hodginkson is physically reminiscent of the late, great Graham Crowden, an actor who specialised in playing malevolent headmasters, surgeons and scientists, all with a gigantic presence undermined by wafer-thin morals (look for him in Lindsay Anderson’s films If…, O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital). But perhaps his most significant forebear is John Cleese’s monstrous creation Basil Fawlty. Apart from the obvious verbal link (Fawlty-Fawlstaff) the nation’s adoration of Fawlty is inextricably linked to him being a complete bigot, racist, misogynist and shyster. In fact, Hodgkinson’s expert pratfall into the ‘buckbasket’ of laundry in Merry Wives is a (perhaps deliberate) recreation of Cleese’s identical move at the end of the Fawlty Towers episode The Kipper and the Corpse: a geometry-defying, head-first, vertical dive with the feet the last to disappear. And the image of Falstaff at the end of this play, alone in the park with a pair of giant horns on his head, inevitably recalls the mounted moose of The Germans episode. An Englishman’s hotel is his castle.

Suburban sitcoms like Fawlty Towers, The Good Life and George and Mildred have their roots in Shakespeare’s one and only comedy of middle England. The ingredients are all there: sexual shenanigans, rebellious teenagers, nosy neighbours, racist depictions of Europeans (one of the biggest laughs comes from the French Dr Caius shouting, ‘If there be one or two, I shall make-a the turd.’) And the link between these two worlds, separated by only four centuries, is made clear even before the play starts. The set, dominated by a revolving house, is, quite literally, mock Tudor. The TV aerial evokes a tiny crown, the stuffed pigeons stare like mute symbols of domestic bliss, the Union Jacks hang limp as England’s chances of winning the European Cup, and the carefully shaped hedges bespeak both the concealing greenery of Twelfth Night and the miniature topiary available from Wickes garden section.

Of course, Shakespeare wasn’t the only Elizabethan playwright producing comedies about middle England. As Callan Davies’s brilliantly readable introduction in the programme explains, John Lyly and Robert Greene were already mining this particular field with plays like Mother Bombie (a ‘vulgar realistic play of rustic life’ set in Rochester) and A Knack to Know a Knave (which, like Merry Wives, was designed as a showpiece for the comic talents of Will Kemp). But Shakespeare’s Windsor, and its petty inhabitants, are instantly recognisable in this production, not because we can relate to them ourselves (what they get up to is distinctly larger-than-life) but because they are so clearly the root and well-spring of our own situation comedies.

McIntyre is a master of group movement. Her Titus Andronicus for the RSC a few years ago featured scenes of mob violence and police control that set a foreboding tone for the production. Here, the residents of Windsor frequently criss-cross the stage, suggesting suburban life carrying on as normal, with tramps, football fans and groups of German tourists all creating the atmosphere of a slightly tacky but comfortable, middle-class town. At the same time, the individual characters are drawn with big, bold outlines aimed unashamedly at wringing every ounce of humour from the material. Special mention must go to Patrick Walshe McBride in his debut RSC season. As Slender (the hopelessly gauche choice of Mr Page as his daughter’s intended husband) he is gloriously awkward. Tying his body in knots of embarrassment, he looks like Mr Bean performed by a young Rik Mayall, and when he finds his true life-partner in the postmaster’s boy, everything seems to make sense. Richard Goulding, as Frank Ford, a man so terrified of his wife’s carnal appetite that he goes to extraordinary lengths to cuckold himself, radiates sexual panic from every pore while resembling an outraged David Cameron. And the Merry Wives themselves, Siubhan Harrison and Samantha Spiro, evoke the Real Housewives of Berkshire, outwitting the prowling Sir John with ease, and clearly loving every moment.

Partly because of Hodgkinson’s wonderfully measured performance as Falstaff, and partly because of the outstanding clarity of speech across the board, the outrageous comedy of Shakespeare’s language is astonishingly accessible in this production. Lines like ‘I had rather be set quick in the earth and bowled to death with turnips’, or ‘I’ll have my brains taken out and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new year’s gift’ rightly produce instant belly-laughs from the (surprisingly sparse) audience. The insults (like ‘What tempest threw this whale with so many tons of oil in his belly ashore at Windsor?’) are reminiscent of Blackadder: cutting, exaggerated and hilarious.

The comic climax of the evening comes in the scene where Sir John attempts to escape from Ford’s house dressed, inexplicably, as the Old Woman of Brentford. Shakespeare’s stage direction simply reads Ford beats him, and he runs away. But McIntyre turns this into an extended, five-minute chase sequence with underwear flying all over the place, accidental humping, and rifle shots bringing down parts of the ceiling. It’s rare that an audience at a Shakespeare play reaches a sustained, ecstatic level of helpless, unstoppable laughter. It happens in this scene. And it’s topped off, after Falstaff has finally made good his escape, by Evans the Welsh vicar mildly observing with barely-suppressed double-entendre, ‘I like it not when a woman has a great beard. I spied a great beard under her muffler.’

Society sex comedies might be a running theme in Artistic Directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s inaugural season. The Buddha of Suburbia and Merry Wives have much in common. And coming up next is Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, which features even more indiscretions behind the arras. Sex sells.

Compared to the plays that deal with massive issues like kingship, love, sacrifice or duty, the stakes in Merry Wives of Windsor are fantastically low. But that doesn’t stop it being a great play. Uniquely in Shakespeare’s canon, it celebrates the creation of humour for its own sake, and it glories in its own inconsequentiality. Shakespeare ranged with equal ease from the deepest tragedy to the lightest comedy. He gave us, as the Hostess of the Garter says, ‘the pro-verbs and the no-verbs’. How lucky we are that our greatest dramatist loves a knob gag just as much as he loves writing the most powerful poetry of all time. And how lucky we are to see it on display in a production as perfect as this.