The merry wives of windsor

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

29.1.95 John Gross

Nobody has ever put The Merry Wives of Windsor in the front rank of Shakespeare's plays. If anything, it tends to be underrated. At a distance, or after an interval, it is easy to forget quite how good it is.

People praise it, for example, as a farce — an accurate but limited recommendation. They point out that it is written almost entirely in prose. They complain, with some justice, that the Falstaff who appears in it is a smaller figure (not literally, of course) than the Falstaff or Henry IV.

But how many other farces are conducted in such exuberant language? The prose is gloriously unprosaic, and Falstaff’s words, however much he has come down in the world, are still winged. "I am a man of continual dissolution and thaw"; "I have a kind of alac­rity in sinking" (this after he has been thrown into the river); "Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?" You won't find them talking like that in The Bed Before Yesterday or Don't Dress for Dinner.

The stagecraft is as impressive as the verbal energy. Some of Shakespeare's humour, in the nature of things, has lost its point, but the comedy of a scene like Siender's reluctant attempt to propose to Anne Page is eternal. And untidy though it is, the play is more than the sum of its parts: we are left with the collective portrait of a community, of the bustling, interlocking lives of a small Elizabethan town.

Terry Hands has a firm grasp of all these truths, the last one in particular is what helps to make his production at the National's Olivier Theatre a resounding success.

Hands has no trouble accepting that Shakespeare's Windsor embodies an expansive and confident phase of English life — middle-class life for the most part, Without glossing over the realism or the rougher aspects, he isn't afraid to bring out the idyllic elements as well.

He makes a great deal, for instance, of the presence of children. Scenes are punctuated by schoolboys chanting, scrambling around, playing leapfrog or conkers. But why not, since the whole play (most notably the scene where Mistress Page's son William is tested by his schoolmaster in Latin) must surely be shot through with boyhood memories of Stratford?

Hands is as well served by his cast as they are by him. The wives themselves Maureen Beattie as Mistress Page and Geraldine Fitzgerald as Mistress Fob are especially good. They are zestful, strong-minded and robust (if Elizabethan women had been poor downtrodden creatures Merry Wires would have seemed as revolutionary as A Doll's House), and their friendship comes across, as it should, as one of the play's central features.

Pantomime

Preparatory exercise:

Consult encyclopedia for the meaning of the following:

Epiphany, Samhain, Saturnalia

Can you say what a pantomime is? Is it popular nowadays? Exchange ideas. How can be a horse or a cow be connected with this genre of theatrical performances? Which of the following words might be useful in describing a pantomime?

reversal festival midwinter feast family audiences song dance

buffoonery slapstick in-jokes children's stories drag villain

good fairy Heaven Hell horse or cow Audience participation

I n Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Ireland pantomime (informally, panto) refers to a musical-comedy theatrical genre, usually performed around the Christmas and New Year holiday season.

The performance of Pantomime originates at its earliest in ancient Greece. The gender role reversal resembles the old festival of Twelfth Night, a combination of Epiphany and midwinter feast, when it was customary for the natural order of things to be reversed. This tradition can be traced back to pre-Christian European festivals such as Samhain and Saturnalia.

The Pantomime first arrived in England as entr'actes between opera pieces, eventually evolving into separate shows. The Lincoln's Inn Field Theatre and the Drury Lane Theatre were the first to stage pantomimes, creating high competition between them to create the more elaborate show. As manager of Drury Lane in the 1870s, Augustus Harris is now considered the father of modern pantomime. The New Wimbledon Theatre in London is considered to be the "home of London pantomime". Many city and provincial theatres have an annual pantomime.

P antomime is very popular with Amateur Dramatics societies throughout the UK , and the Pantomime season (roughly speaking, December to February) will see pantomime productions in many village halls and similar venues across the country.

Traditionally performed at Christmas, with family audiences consisting mainly of children and parents, British pantomime is now a popular form of theatre, incorporating song, dance, buffoonery, slapstick, in-jokes, audience. Plots are often loosely based on traditional children's stories, the most popular titles being:

A laddin (sometimes combined with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves);

Babes in the Wood (often combined with Robin Hood);

Cinderella, the most popular of all pantomimes;

Mother Goose;

Puss in Boots;

Sleeping Beauty;

Peter Pan.

T he form has a number of conventions:

• The leading male character (the "principal boy") is usually played by a young woman.

• An older woman (the pantomime dame) is usually played by a man in drag.

• Audience participation, including calls of "he's behind you!", and "oh yes it is!" or "oh no it isn't!" The audience is always encouraged to "boo" the villain.

• The pantomime horse or cow, played by two actors in a single costume, one as the head and front legs, the other as the body and back legs.

• The good fairy always enters from the right side of the stage and the evil villain enters from the left. (the right side of the stage symbolized Heaven and the left side symbolized Hell).

• A nother contemporary panto tradition is the celebrity guest star.

O ne of the most popular and critically acclaimed (not to mention commercially successful) pantomimes in recent years has been the one at the York Theatre Royal. It features no guest celebrities, but rather a regular cast headed by Berwick Kaler, who has played the dame there for 27 years and has built up a devoted fan-base. Kaler has been credited with reviving a dying tradition. Tickets go on sale April 1; in 2005 the first buyer turned up at 3am. Well before the opening they had sold 30,000 of the 50,000 seats, something that many celebrity-centred pantos could only dream of. He was interviewed by The Independent newspaper in 2004 for an article marking his 25th season:

"The panto," Kaler says, "has been said to be dying for years. Well, some of them deserve to die." These are the ones that flout tradition by casting a young man as principal boy, or by diminishing the role of the dame, sometimes writing her out altogether.

Pantomime is not to be confused with a mime artist, referring to a theatrical performer of mime. Famous European Mime Artists like Etienne Decroux, and Marcel Marceau or modern Pantomime Damir Dantes took the technical aspect of this ancient art to the highest levels of physical expression requiring long years of practice and enormous body control for this art of creating multi dimensional Illusions without any props on stage.

From Wikipedia

Second reading

1. Explain the following proper names: the York Theatre Royal, Berwick Kaler, Etienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau, Damir Dantes.

2. How did pantomime appear in the UK? With what theatres is it especially connected?

3. Get ready to describe the main features of pantomime in class.

4. Air your view to the point: Why do some pantos use celebrities in their shows?

5. What does the skill of a pantomime artist include?

6. H ow can you explain Kaler Berwick’s success? Does he use the fame of celebrities to make his pantomimes more successful?

7. Have you ever seen any performances of this genre? Tell about you r impressions to your groupmates.

That’s interesting! Pantomime Horse in Guinness Book of World Records!

Fastest pantomime horse by a team (male)

Charles Astor (the front) and Tristan Williams (the rear) (both UK) completed a distance of 100m inside their pantomime horse costume in a time of 13.51 sec at Harrow School, on 18 August 2005.

Exercise. Fill in the gaps with the words given below.

Pantomime, the traditional Christmas entertainment for children in Britain, has never, ..(1).. I know, become popular abroad, ..(2).. the comic techniques employed in it ..(3).. a clown of Italian origin, Joseph Grimaldi, ..(4).. the early nineteenth century made him the best-loved man in the British theatre. Unfortunately, pan­tomime is almost ..(5).. anyone who has never seen it as the game of cricket. I once spent half an hour talking about cricket to a foreigner. At last, he could not help ..(6).. me.

1 had just said that the ball sometimes travelled ..(7).. hour and ..(8).. this time he was sure I was making fun of him. He thought I had been talking about croquet.

P antomime, then, is the theatrical representation of a fairy story, like Cinderella, but ..(9).. in a number of stage conventions that have been developed over the years. These conventions ..(10).. they seem quite normal to children who are used to them, are ..(11).. more complicated than you might expect. ..(12).., the hero (such as the Prince in Cinderella) is played by a girl. ..(13).., in case you ..(14)..wondering how..(15)..! But Cinderella's sisters are played by men and so on.

What is most surprising is that pantomime not only survives in 1980 but that is ..(16).. The main reasons for this is that ..(17).. to participate. They must ..(18).. the hero if the villain is coming and some of them go ..(19) .. to meet the comedi­an.

"How old are you?" asks the comedian. 'That's funny. When I was .(20).. I was thirteen". Children love it.

1	A	as far as	11	A	quite
	B	as much as		B	fairly
	C	of what		C	rather
	D	to the extent that		D	just
2	A	however	12	A	At first
	B	nevertheless		B	In principle
	C	although		C	In the beginning
	D	in spite of		D	To start with
3	A	own a great deal of	13	A	Also is the heroine
	B	own a great deal to		B	Also the heroine is
	C	owe a great deal of		c	So is the heroine
	D	owe a great deal to		D	So the heroine is
4	A	which performances in	14	A	can be
	B	which performances on		B	are
	C	whose performances in		C	will we
	D	whose performances on		D	would be
5	A	as difficult to explain	15	A	far sex changes can go
	B	as difficult to explain to		B	far can go sex changes
	c	so difficult to explain		C	long sex changes can go
	D	so difficult to explain to		D	long can go sex changes
6	A	interrupting to	16	A	as popular as ever
	B	interrupting		B	as popular as never
	C	to interrupt to		c	so popular as ever
	D	to interrupt		D	so popular as never
7	A	for 100 km an	17	A	it's given the chance to children
	B	for 100 km the		B	it's given to children the chance
	c	at 100 km the		c	to children is given the chance
	D	at 100 km the		D	children are given the chance
8 A		at	18	A	announce
B		for		B	advertise
C		by		c	warn
D		in		D	threaten
9 A		its attraction lays	19	A	into the scene
B		its attraction lies		B	into the stage
C		it's attraction lays		C	on to the scene
D		it's attraction lies		D	on to the stage
10 A		as	20	A	the age of you
B		for all		B	your age
c		yet		C	the same age as you
D		while		D	the same age that you