This is how Sir John Falstaff reflects on the ignominy of being dumped in the Thames with filthy washing.

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow
of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?
Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my
brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a
dog for a New Year’s gift.  S’blood, the rogues
slighted me into the river with as little remorse as
they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies,
fifteen i’ th’ litter! And you may know by my size
that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom
were as deep as hell, I should drown. I had
been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and
shallow—a death that I abhor, for the water swells
a man, and what a thing should I have been when
I had been swelled! By the Lord, I should have
been a mountain of mummy.

This may remind you of the philosophical reflection of a sometime Spanish knight after a similar humiliation.  After being trampled on by a herd of bulls, Don Quixote laments:

Here I am with my name in the history books, a famous man of arms, courteous in my conduct, respected by princes, sought after by damsels, and just when I was expecting palms, triumphs, and crowns, I find myself this morning, as a climax to it all, trodden under foot, battered and kicked by a herd of filthy animals.

These are probably the two most famous characters in our literature.  They were created at about the same time.  In saluting what we may call the modern era, or the end of the Middle Ages, they stand for the end of all that moonshine about chivalry.  In the case of The Merry Wives of Windsor, we seethe arrival of the middle class as the centre of attention on our stage, a kind of Elizabethan prelude to Coronation Street, Neighbours, and Friends – although we had to wait centuries before Jennifer Anniston became the most photographed person on the planet, and bowed out in front of 52 million television viewers.

Well, that is one factor behind the snobbery that this play of Shakespeare attracts.  It may be his only play for which he supplied most of the plot, but the lead, Sir John Falstaff, had exploded on the stage in two history plays, before being killed off in another. 

But, as fans of Shakespeare are wont to remind fans of Verdi, the Falstaff of the comedy is much softer than the Falstaff of the history plays.  The brash insolence, fraud, drunkenness, cowardice, and womanizing are constant.  But in the comedy, and the Verdi opera Falstaff, we are spared watching Falstaff the recruiter accepting bribes to allow some poor blighters to be be despatched for cannon fodder.  If he cannot be said to rat on his mates, it’s because he does not have any.  It was this kind of nastiness, which gives a guilty edge to our glee, that led Sir Anthony Quayle call Falstaff ‘frankly vicious.’

The play and the opera are both put on to make us laugh and give us a good time – and reconcile ourselves to our condition.  Well, God only knows how much we need that release and therapy now.  Someone in the trade got up Verdi’s nose by saying he could not write an opera for comedy like Rossini.  Falstaff was Verdi’s answer.

At the beginning of the play, Page is discussing the form of his greyhound, which had just been outrun.  He tells Falstaff they have a hot venison pasty for dinner, and says ‘Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.’  At the end of the play, his wife says ‘let us every one go home, And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire….’  That is precisely the tone of the whole show – and it is precisely the tone of the whole Verdi score.  It may be the most remarkable marriage of script and score that I know.

Still, some snobbery attaches to the play – but not I think to the opera.  W H Auden just refused to lecture on the play.  Well, at least he had the courtesy to refer his audience to the opera.  My own view is that if you are not uplifted by any decent performance of the play, you need help.  As for the opera – Shakespeare is the best playwright that we know, and there are only two challengers to Verdi for that position as composer of opera.  In the result, Falstaff is not just my favourite Verdi opera, but my favourite across the board.  (I may say that I have never taken to the opera Macbeth, and that the play Othello gives me the willies.   Strawberries out of order have the same effect on me as they did on Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.)

And for those who have been cruelled by Wagner, Falstaff has one unassailable charm.  It is not too long.  It takes less time than the final act of Wagner’s comedy.

Well, those who turned out to Covent Garden in October, 1999 to see a new production of Falstaff sure got their money’s worth.  The house, especially behind the famous curtain, had just had a major rebuild.  The lead was played by a popular local, Bryn Terfel.  The band was conducted by the urbane and unflappable Bernard Haitink.  The costumes and sets were alarmingly attention-grabbing.  The full crowd was expectant and knowing – and they got all that they wanted.  This is, after all, a show in which the English may claim some rights.  And I was at home, with Opus Arte, red at hand, cheering them all on.

At first, I thought the sets and costumes were overdone, and distracting.   But I acclimatised, especially after hearing the director say later that this is after all an Italian opera, and that the story had Italian roots.  (In the extras, Haitink said this is the one opera of Verdi where not one note, not one, is out of place.  Terfel in interview was entirely at ease and bore a remarkable resemblance to Richard Burton in so many ways.  The commentary on the massive work backstage is riveting.) 

This is an opera where the music is integral to the whole show to an extent rarely seen outside of Mozart and Wagner.  As it goes, it gets ethereal, but we always come back to what it is there for – to give us a great night out and send us home more at peace with our neighbours and the world.  And that’s God’s work.

The highlight of this show was the peak of dramatic irony where Falstaff is telling Ford disguised as Brook how he will get Ford’s wife into bed.  The incoming bourgeoisie, the future rulers of television and the world, are terrified of being cuckolded.  You may as well be castrated.  The English language has no female counterpart to ‘unmanned.’  The sequence is as paralyzingly funny as the mirror sequence with Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, and is a warrant for the value of filming this kind of theatre, so that we can see close-up the facial contortions of the splendid Italian actor.  For some reason, his pain and anguish at the cruelty of fate reminded me so strongly of that of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners.  There are times when we get almost viscerally grabbed by the universality of theatre going right back to commedia dell’ arte and the Greeks.  And all this at what used to be a convent, then a red-light area, and now one of the more singular tourist traps on this earth.

And with it all there is a sense of elegy – unless that is just my coming to grips with coming gutsers as I get older.  Falstaff is not what he was.  They know it, and so does he.  An autumnal wistfulness pervades Henry IV Part II until it is shattered by an act of brutal betrayal.  We are spared this in the comedy and opera based on it, but not in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight also entitled Falstaff.  (I do think it was a bit rich to give Jeanne Moreau second billing, when the tart Doll Tearsheet gets about three lines.)

In his play, Parolles gets his come-uppance too, but his decline and fall is total, and the pathos is scarcely funny.  As Tony Tanner remarked in discussing All’s Well, Falstaff in the comedy ‘dusts himself off fairly breezily…his attitude is more resigned – you win some, you lose some, and as you get older you lose more.’ 

I know just what he means, and perhaps that is why this play and opera just keeps getting better for me as I age.  It calls to mind a desolate Friday lunch in an Adelaide pub after court about forty years ago with a fading silk.  ‘You know, Mate, we are just like cats.  For every fight you have, you have one less to give.’

The Australian Opera put on a show of Falstaff in Melbourne about twenty years ago that mesmerised me and converted me to being a life-long a fan of both the play and the opera.  Well, this show at Covent Garden, now on film, is up there with the best – perhaps the locals can claim a home ground advantage, even if we now miss the subtle charms of the Crush Bar.  If anyone wants to challenge the West End as the beating heart of world theatre, they will have to get up bloody early.