THEATRE / Marriages of inconvenience: Paul Taylor reviews The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

THE CAST of David Thacker's new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at Stratford act with the desperate energy and forced, distracting brightness of people who have a murdered body in the next room they would really much rather you didn't find out about.

Nothing wrong with that, you might think - this is, after all, a farce in which Sir John Falstaff, at one point, only narrowly escapes being discovered in a laundry basket by the husband of the woman he has just tried to seduce. With this production, though, you quickly start to suspect that all the nervous effort and laboured jokiness are less an attempt to reveal the play than a bid to cover up a lack of faith in a badly under-directed and only spuriously spirited venture.

The Merry Wives is not one of Shakespeare's more profound comedies; even so, in its present guise, it looks as two-dimensional as William Dudley's designs (curls of paper coil down charmingly to give a helter-skelter feel to the spiral staircases). Even the best performances are infected by the general coarseness.

Anton Lesser, for example, is often very funny as a diminutive but toweringly manic Ford, the character who, convinced his wife is cuckolding him, poses as Brook, a rejected suitor, and makes himself privy to Falstaff's exploits by paying the knight to seduce Mistress Ford on his behalf. Dressed in all-grey Elizabethan togs, with briefcase and fussy little tache, Lesser's Ford is a constipated commuter before the breed was invented. But his suspicions bring out the rabid dog in him, particularly when he scrabbles for Falstaff in the laundry basket and flings up a grubby shower of clothes like a demented canine out to exhume a bone. Assuming for brief, involuntary snatches the face of a man whose testicles are being tightly twisted, he is also very good at signalling Ford's extreme discomfiture at what he is learning, while disguised as Brook.

There are bits of business, though, that spoil the performance by overdoing things badly. The low point was when he not only punched his fist right through a piece of furniture, but also trod in a bowl of something yukky and then (for the second time, no less) yelled with delayed-effect pain after pulling off his false moustache. To see that gag once might have been considered nostalgic, to see it twice . . .

Benjamin Whitrow plays Falstaff rather as a game old scholarly vicar might; true, Sir John is only a shadow of his former self in this play, but you can't believe that this Falstaff could ever have posed a moral threat to the respectable middle classes of Windsor. As the females he has designs on, Cheryl Campbell and Gemma Jones bring a likeably amused outrage and mischief to their counter-plotting (although Campbell seems more like a brilliant mechanical doll than a woman). As for the young love-interest, Fenton and Anne Page register so little with the audience here that it's hard to give a damn about them. Ron Cook, who plays the French Dr Caius as a posturing, Gallic pipsqueak, hilariously revives an ancient routine with swords, but in general the mirthless funny business and the hyper atmosphere make for a miserable Merry Wives.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (Box office: 0789 295623).

(Photograph omitted)