Review: THE MERRY WIVES, Wandsworth Fringe Festival

If Edinburgh (population 550,000) can have a gigantic Fringe Festival, why can’t Wandsworth (population 330,000) have one too? Well, there may be a few answers to that but none good enough to stop the South London borough setting aside 17 days in June for a cavalcade of events - and rightly so! 

One of which is The Merry Wives, updating Shakespeare for 2023, staged in the faded splendour of The Bedford where I once saw a very young Matt Lucas doing an early version of his “Sir Bernard Chumley” character, who later inspired Boris Johnson’s famous “Boris Johnson” act. (That last bit may not be true).

Lucas was rough and ready back then and so is this show, fringe festivals being fringe festivals. There’s some talent for sure - Laura Sillett channels a bit of Dame Edna’s mannerisms and comic timing with her Mrs Quickly and elsewhere one catches a little Catherine Tate here and a little Jane Horrocks there. 

Writer, Gary Thomas, plays fast and loose with Shakey’s text and, in doing so, he demystifies the language but we never quite know where we’re landing as the next scene kicks off in this hectic, episodic production. Throw in gender flips (and I know there was plenty of that sort of thing in Elizabethan theatre) sexuality mash ups and an array of eye-catching if somewhat gaudy costumes, and the convoluted plotting of the source material, with its confusions, its mismatches and its Falstaff causing trouble, is lost. I knew the play (not one of the Bard’s more popular works) so I don’t know how newbies kept up!

The songs (a selection of standards and power ballads) played by Joanne King’s band, are sung with great gusto, some voices sounding ready for much larger stages. Indeed, a Six style presentation, foregrounding the songs and the characters singing them, would have clarified the galloping narrative that always seems to be in control of director, David O’Mahony, rather than the other way round.

At the moment, The Merry Wives is not quite a musical and not quite a play with music either. Resolve that, work with the cast’s considerable strengths in singing and comic characterisation and there’s a project here that may not follow exactly in the steps of Six all the way to Broadway, but will entertain audiences who need not fear the dead hand of iambic pentameter and textual analysis on their shoulder.      

The Merry Wives is at the Laurels Theatre, Whitley Bay 27 and 28 July

Wandsworth Arts Fringe continues until 25 June    

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