Wadham College Gardens have probably never seen anything like it. What appears to be an English summer garden fete, complete with usually prize vegetable, cream cake, and tombola stalls, has turned from conservative and gentile into a saucy, cream-pie throwing farce.

But don’t worry, the WI haven’t turned feral, it’s just the latest production from the Oxford Shakespeare Company, who specialise in open-air and site specific theatre.

It was director Gemma Fairlie’s idea to set The Merry Wives of Windsor in a fete, where she could employ this quintessential British event to maximum comic effect. “On reading through the play I was struck by the hugely comic theme of it. There’s jealousy, love, LUST,” explains Gemma adding emphasis to the latter emotion. “All of those emotions that go way back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, who threw phalluses about. It went on through the Carry On films and naughty postcards tradition in the 1950s, and then into TV sitcom.

“It’s a humour that we love,” she continues. “Fawlty Towers, for instance, still remains one of the most watched series. We love comedy that is violent, bawdy, and shows people at their worst. We are fascinated by people in these extreme situations, and that’s exactly what Merry Wives involves. You have a man who has decided that he is the most adorable Lothario, and that women can’t resist him, despite his gross size and ageing years. In order to get cash, he has worked out that the two-middle class wives of Windsor, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, are prime targets because they hold their husbands’ purse strings. He will woo them, and they will take care of him.”

This will all be translated, Gemma reveals with glee, by stuffing a fat man into a basket, an aggrieved husband destroying his wife’s cake stall, and an innocent bystander being smacked in the face with an éclair, panto-style. Genteel this village fete plainly is not. “But these sort of things do happen in villages and small communities all round the UK,” Gemma insists.

We’re talking, appropriately enough, in a former London cinema where the OSC is rehearsing – the Carry On films were probably shown under this very roof. When, I ask Gemma, did she first get to enjoy this very British kind of humour?

“I remember pantomime when I was very young. It was brilliant. I remember the dame, the green light that you’d have for the villainess, and the feeling that food is really vital to farce and panto: as a kid, you absolutely love food fights. Also, my dad was very keen on the Carry On films, and people like Pete and Dud, so I very much latched on to that. Then I discovered Monty Python, and I was in heaven.”

Rolling around in Merry Wives is one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated characters, the huge Sir John Falstaff. But in these medically-aware times, perhaps his doctor put him on a diet?

“We unashamedly keep him fat. Master Ford’s term for him is brilliant: “epicurean”. He loves everything – himself first and foremost, but also food, women, and a lot of drinking. He really enjoys it all. We’re going for a lot of physical clowning and farce, and we wanted him to really revel in his own body, and sexuality. Otherwise we’re back to Victorian times when you couldn’t even show an ankle, never mind get your shirt off.”

The imagination boggles. But the trouble with directing comedy is that you are leaping into the unknown. The walls of the rehearsal studio offer no response to your jokes or comic mayhem. So will Gemma be hiding behind a bush to gauge reaction as her Merry Wives meets its first audiences in Wadham Gardens?

“Whenever I work on comedy the rule is: ‘If we find it funny, then that’s a really good start’. But yes, I will keep tweaking through the first few previews. Comedy has to come from the truth, the surprise, and for us particularly in farce, the feeling of something becoming so uncontrollably ridiculous that you just have to laugh.”

 

The Merry Wives of Windsor
Wadham College Gardens
Until August 16
Tickets: 01865 305305
or ticketsoxford.com