Falstaff is England’s Biggest Idol

And maybe Austin’s too!

Just thinking back to 2006 when I played Pistol to Courtney Glenn’s Fallstaf, I couldn’t agree more.  The Weird Sisters set the Merry Wives of Windsor in the 1950’s, Falstaff taking on an unmistakable bad-boy Elvis persona (sideburns and all).  We had screaming audience members, groupies, possibly even fainting.  We all had character envy that season, Falstaff was a deliciously fun, even complicated character to play.  It was hard not to be enamored.  I think we all carry a little bit of Shakespeare’s favorite foil inside us.

This article about the pop-star-like influence of Falstaff by Henry Hitchings from The London Evening Standard proves an interesting read:

Falstaff is a glutton, a coward and an idler. His enthusiasms include drinking, boasting, petty criminality and, when the chance presents itself and his body doesn’t fail him, sex. To be “Falstaffian” is to delight in excess: a Falstaffian night out is more likely a stag party or a booze-up after a big football victory than an elegant soirée.

No other character of Shakespeare’s is quite so loaded with faults and foibles. And yet watching him carouse on a summer evening — Roger Allam is the latest to take on the role, in Dominic Dromgoole’s productions of the two parts of Henry IV at The Globe — we understand immediately why actors so relish playing the role. We see, too, why audiences lap up his antics with such eagerness and why he is the only one of Shakespeare’s characters to have got his own spin-off play.

Though a knight — technically Sir John, even if more convincing as Plump Jack — Falstaff dismisses what he calls the “grinning honour” of chivalry, acclaiming instead a passionate vitality. He does so with the three simple words “Give me life” — and the life he wants is one of dissipation. No wonder he is such an English icon.

Falstaff appears in three of Shakespeare’s plays. First come the two parts of Henry IV, which he dominates. Then there is The Merry Wives of Windsor, written to capitalise on the success of the earlier works (and staged later in the Globe’s season, with Christopher Benjamin as Falstaff). There is a rather doubtful story that Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives at the request of Queen Elizabeth I; she allegedly wanted to see more of this inimitable figure, and liked the idea of witnessing the effects on him of being in love.

But it is the Henry plays that define our vision of the character. In the first of them Falstaff is a tutor and surrogate father to Hal, the “truant” prince. When we initially see them together, they are discussing Falstaff’s offences: his skill in stealing purses and his fondness for sleeping in the afternoon.

For Hal, Falstaff is a welcome antidote to the stuffy seriousness of court life. Hal calls him “my old lad of the castle”, a thinly veiled reference to the inspiration for the character, the knight Sir John Oldcastle, as well as to a popular Southwark brothel. Oldcastle was condemned as a heretic yet later celebrated as a Protestant martyr, and a 16th-century audience would have grasped the connection.

Other characters view the relationship between Falstaff and Hal with horror. Falstaff hardly seems a worthy companion for a prince. His preferred environment is the Boar’s Head Tavern on Eastcheap, where he quaffs sherry.

He is strangely free from constraints. His affection for Hal appears to be his only tie; otherwise he is unfettered by protocol, and he is ready to challenge his society’s fundamental values, as when he asks “What is honour?” and curtly answers his own question — “A word.” The poet WH Auden aptly suggested that “if Falstaff were running the world, it would be like the Balkans”.

As Hal matures and begins to show regal qualities, the two men grow apart. Falstaff becomes a scapegoat. In the first part of Henry IV, his presence is always the occasion for ebullient buffoonery; in the second he appears diminished and is constantly the butt of other characters’ sour jokes.

He is a magnet for artful use of language. He’s called a “huge hill of flesh”, a “fat-kidneyed rascal”, a “stuffed cloak-bag of guts”, a “white-bearded Satan”, a “trunk of humours”, a “horse-breaker”, a “villainous abominable misleader of youth” and a “whoreson obscene greasy tallow-keech” — these not even the assessments of his enemies.

Yet it is Falstaff’s own language, which he uses to create a myth around himself, that thrills those who play him. He is a vehicle for Shakespeare’s verbal inventiveness. His speeches are tricked out with ludicrous similes: one moment he says he is as melancholy as a “lugg’d bear”, the next he likens his mood to the “drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe”.

On the stage, there have been many magisterial Falstaffs. The definitive 20th-century interpretation is often said to have been Ralph Richardson’s at the Old Vic in 1950. The great critic Kenneth Tynan applauded this “dry and dignified” Falstaff, who in his moments of disgrace affected “the mask of sulky schoolboy”.

But Falstaff has a dynamic life beyond the theatre. There are several operas about him. Of these the best-known is Verdi’s, in which Falstaff’s love of intoxicating substances impels a tribute to the exhilarating power of music.

The character emerges in a different guise in Gus van Sant’s film My Own Private Idaho, where he is a scruffy, drug-addled hustler. And while Falstaff does not appear in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh both found ways of working him into their big-screen versions.

The most remarkable Falstaff on film is Orson Welles, whose rarely seen Chimes at Midnight (1965) is one of his finest efforts as both actor and director. Welles identified closely with Falstaff, describing him as a “refugee” and a model of innocence; in portraying him as a good man ill-equipped to deal with the roughness of modernity, he was commenting on his own rejection by a film industry that had little time for his grand ambition.

Still, it is in the theatre that Falstaff’s charisma is most palpable. Watching Allam at The Globe, one cannot help feeling that Falstaff embodies certain quintessentially English attributes, a mix of the admirable and the execrable. He exhibits a drunken, slippery selfishness, yet also a resilient pride and an instinct for self-preservation. In his vices he is never odious, only ridiculous. His fabled fatness symbolises the magnitude of his humanity, and, alert to his own moral weakness, he is full of witty comment on the subject. He turns out to be a liar, but he is also capable of articulating unsettling truths.

Although St George is the patron saint of England, in truth he was a Roman soldier. Falstaff’s Englishness admits no such ambiguity. He seems to re-awaken a Chaucerian spirit of comedy and carnival.

Falstaff is a patriot of the kind governments fear: a force for liberty, with an Englishman’s aptitude for making words do just what he wants them to. Much too fat to be a fighter, he can nevertheless wriggle out of a tight situation.

At the tavern, he is a Lord of Misrule, a ruffian full of topsy-turvy wisdom. In this he prefigures Johnny Byron, the maverick anti-hero of Jez Butterworth’s recent smash hit Jerusalem. He is a man of irrepressible appetites, whose favourite meal would be breakfast if only he could get up in time. We are even told that he “sweats to death” — and that, surely, is a very English kind of problem.

Sycorax: Review by Georgia Young

The following is excerpted from www.theAustinist.com, in a review dated June 24, 2010 penned by Georgia Young. Read the full review here >

Woe to the women of Shakespeare! It seems so many of them can be filed into two neat categories: fools who sacrifice their lives for love, and evil hags. However, contemporary theatermakers often take advantage of the playwright’s cadaverous status to reinterpret his work (and well they should).

Hence Sycorax, a new play by Susan Gayle Todd, of the Weird Sisters Women’s Theater Collective, which produced this production at a new performance space, the Gemini Playhouse. This play, a response to The Tempest, focuses on Sycorax, mother of Caliban. Opening with text taken from Shakespeare’s play, the audience gets a quick rundown of the situation: we meet Prospero, an exiled Italian duke and sorceror, living on an island with his teenage daughter, Miranda; a spirit, Ariel; and the beastly Caliban. Prospero subjugates all three—his offspring seems like a helpless flake, Ariel is constantly threatened by Prospero’s power (he freed Ariel from imprisonment by Sycorax in a tree), and Caliban is bossed around and reminded that his mother was a “foul witch.” There’s plenty to respond to here, and Todd has chosen to focus on the woman who receives only brief mention in Shakespeare’s text, but whose impact on Ariel and Caliban reverberate. We know little of Sycorax: she was apparently banished from Algiers for sorcery and dumped, pregnant, on this remote island.

That leaves plenty of room for interpretation, and Todd writes this woman as a black, lesbian healer, who—surprise surprise—is useful to those in power only until they get themselves in trouble and need somebody to blame. Todd follows the arc of Sycorax’s life, the rise of her reputation as a sort of shaman-doctor bringing her financial comfort and fame, her romantic partnership with a female assistant, and her run-ins with the sometimes embarrassing, sometimes vicious behavior of powerful men. The play hops between this progression and her voyage to the island, her punishment as a scapegoat for the vanities and waste of the governor of Algiers. Imprisoned, oddly, on the ship’s deck, sailors eye her warily, telling piggish jokes and sexist stories and urging one particularly wimpy looking deckhand to use her as he will.

Acting ability ranges widely—the all-female cast handles male roles with varying success, though the caricatured feel of many of the masculine roles doesn’t seem out of place, since Todd’s text has nothing nice to say about any of them. Azure Osborne-Lee’s sturdy, resolute Sycorax contrasts with Feliz Dia McDonald’s puckish, sharp-toothed Ariel, and Noelle Fitzsimmons, as Sycorax’s lover Clare, radiates a goofy sweetness that makes the relationship feel genuine….

The story itself is interesting, though the bawdy sailor talk sometimes drags, and there’s a female circumcision scene that somehow manages to be both yucky, inoffensive, and unclear (a peek at the program clarified what was going on). Todd writes a rich life for Sycorax, but there are a few confusing points. In her portrayal of Ariel and Sycorax’s relationship, Ariel appears to have lent magical power to Sycorax most of her life, jealously criticizing and sabotaging her relationships. The spirit, in spite of his apparent position of power, seems to profess that he is serving Sycorax—this falls in line with Shakespeare’s text, but leaves unanswered questions about how Sycorax is able to eventually trap him and how Prospero is able to control him later.

Another question that must be asked of this feminist response to The Tempest is why Todd doesn’t address the issue of Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. In her brief appearances in Sycorax, Miranda is still a dreamy, dopey teenager, in thrall to the only two men she has ever known—her father and Caliban. The play closes with an imagined scene between Caliban and Miranda, taking place before the time of The Tempest, an apparently mutually romantic moment, (perhaps meant to portray what Prospero implied was Caliban’s attempted rape of the girl). The scene ties up Todd’s story nicely, as Caliban tells the story of his mother and father, mirroring Sycorax’s own fantastical self-penned origin story earlier in the play. Todd mostly maintains a sharp focus on Sycorax, but this final scene leaves one wondering why the black, lesbian healer got a voice, while poor Miranda was left as tongue-tied as ever.

Todd and the Weird Sisters have created a rich slice of one woman’s world. Sycorax may not be a particularly direct critique of The Tempest, but it fills in a gap in one of Shakespeare’s universes, an interesting exercise for a Bard-focused theater group.

Weirds discuss Sycorax on KOOP

Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 11am Co-Director and Playwright, Susan Gayle Todd and Composer, Chris Humphrey appeared on Lisa Schneider’s show “What’s a Girl to Do?” on KOOP 91.7FM Schneider’s show centers around music written and performed by women, and focused on the original music of Sycorax, composed and assembled by Humphrey.

Listen to the radio show below:

Music of Sycorax interview with Chris Humphrey and Susan Todd