Making Donkey Jackets Rock Again: The Merry Wives of Windsor Sitcom

As ever I’m amazed by the creativity of the Guildford Shakespeare Company.

This time they’ve created The Merry Wives of Windsor as an online 1970s sitcom, filmed on their phones around various social distancing rules and around the UK Lockdowns. Somehow they’ve managed to match up gardens, work with meeting outside rules (including a tennis match! and swings… and someone owns an ice cream van?!!!) match their dance moves to the music (at a distance), and root out their best 1970s flares and platforms. Not to mention an almost duel! Very well done — themed in the year of the 1977 Jubilee.

I love the fact that they turned into a band at the end!

Also loved also the ‘in the laundry bag’ filming as Falstaff is carried along and apparently dumped in the river! He then turns up in a dressing gown to drink some wine as he ‘dries off’.

The ‘Good Life/Terry and June[d]’ plot is Windsor where Falstaff comes to harass the wives of the local townsmen; one husband disguising himself as a Bee Gee/Travolta-esque character in order to prove the falseness of his wife when left to her own devices. Ofcourse the wives are onto the plots and prove everyone wrong, whilst getting their comic revenge. There’s also a sub-plot to marry off a daughter to a couple of suitors (a horrible MP, a less horrible Welsh priest and a hippish French man). As everyone runs off with everyone else in disguise, the daughter gets to marry the man she wants to — will she be forgiven?

Worth watching for this vision in wig, flares and platforms alone….

@Images are the author’s own, taken from the Guildford Shakespeare Company’s Production of The Merry Wives of Windsor Sitcom