MRISHO MPOTO AT SHAKESPEARES FESTIVAL LONDON APRIL 2012

Mrisho Mpoto's Falstaff woos Lydiah Gitachu's Mistress FordBoth images by Marc Brenner for Shakespeare's Globe

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, his reprise of Falstaffian humour to please Queen Bess is surely the most specific in its prosaic gallimaufry of earthy English vocabulary. Yet it’s also the most universal in its target-practice at the lecherous, traditionally overbuilt gentleman-hero. So it was easy enough to forego relish of words like "wittol", "frampold" and "drumble", not to mention the choicest fat-man insults, and just enjoy the broader brushstrokes of the fun had by independent-minded Nairobi wives at the expense of Mrisho Mpoto’s jolly Sir John throughout this exuberant production in Swahili from Bitter Pill and The Theatre Company Kenya.

The bald summaries of each scene on the electronic screens either side of the stage – no texts are to be expected, I’m surmising, in any of Globe to Globe’s remaining 33 foreign-language productions - disappoint less here than in Ngakau Toa’s visceral Troilus and Cressida, where swathes of poetry and rhetoric had to pass uncomprehended by all but the Maori spectators among the groundlings. Falstaff’s dunking in the river, his drag escape as the Fat Woman of Brentford and his drubbing by suspect fairies in a forest can be understood by all, and this production, by Daniel Goldman and Sarah Norman with eight actors taking on 20 roles, carries off each episode with unflagging zest; there’s none of the sense of mindless repetition which can dog less well-paced Merry Wives.
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