Okay, this bawdy domestic comedy featuring the fat knight Falstaff in wooing mode is never going to rank among Shakespeare’s greatest plays, but a fine cast of comic actors make Sean Holmes’s rare London revival a treat. It’s led by George Fouracres, the Black Country comedian-turned-actor who’s brought revelatory zest to several Shakespearean clowns at the Globe in recent years.
Here, his Falstaff is resplendently pear-shaped in red silk and polished greaves, a sheepskin cloak on his shoulders and a roguish twinkle in his eye. There’s spirit and sport as well as greed in his decision to woo two married women, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, and enough shaggy, grizzled charm about him to support Holmes’s conceit that Mistress Ford might actually be tempted.
