The Merry Wives of Windsor is not one of Shakespeare's very best, but I do find it amusing and fun. I found this performance to be the opposite though. It is saved by Lisa Barnes' sparkling Anne Page and Dixie Tymitz's conniving Mistress Quickly as well as a few amusing directorial touches. Other than that it is extremely lacking in a lot of areas. The settings lack the sumptuous quality I like to see, if anything it did look very stark a lot of the time. The crude editing didn't help matters either. The costumes aren't so bad, but there is little interesting about them at the same time, some of them are very drab. The make-up was ridiculously overblown, Slender and Bardolph fare worst and Sir John Falstaff has a very grotesque appearance even for the character. The stage direction on the whole didn't engage, the slapstick came across as clumsy instead, the fight sequences is ridiculous and you could tell by the aimless gestures and the dull chemistry that the actors did not know how to interact with one another and everything felt under-rehearsed and amateurish. Consequently, it felt so leaden and so devoid of life. The rest of the acting is poor, Leon Charles blusters his way through his role as Falstaff with no nobility or subtlety, Valerie Seelie-Snyder and Addison Randall are dull, Lyle Stephen doesn't seem to have a clue what he is doing looking bemused a lot of the time and Caius and Sir Hugh are performed with some odd and out-of-place accents. So all in all, not a complete shambles but not recommended at all. 3/10 Bethany Cox
