The Merry Wives of Windsor – The Roman Theatre of St Albans
Approaching Shakespeare with much as much joy and as little reverence as the children’s book “When Pigasso met Mootisse” treats the artists whose work it adapts, this production is technically recognizable as one of the most often neglected of the great playwright’s works but is in many ways a chimera of Elizabethan bawd, modern sensibility, and eighties sound.
Not only soundtracked by the hits of that decade, this script is also peppered with cultural references time-specific enough that its heightened accessibility is restricted almost exclusively to audiences Gen X and up. This is not entirely a bad thing. Even the least meddled with performing script of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor has both a humour and a logic inherent to it that demands an adult understanding of money ...