Theatre review: Bard on the Beach's spirited, soccer-mad take on The Merry Wives of Windsor builds a wonderfully no-frills sense of place
In writer Bruce Horak and Rebecca Northan’s shamelessly fun update, the comedy’s colourful schemers, lovers, and busybodies are regulars at a Vancouver community centre during World Cup fever
The Merry Wives of Windsor. Photo by Emily Cooper
Bard on the Beach presents The Merry Wives of Windsor at the BMO Mainstage at Sen̓áḵw–Vanier Park to September 19
A WAVE OF RAISED arms ripples across the crowd, pulling spectators into its momentum as it moves from one side of the stands to the other. It's not happening at BC Place, or outside the flag-draped bars on Granville Street, or in front of the packed outdoor screens at the PNE’s FIFA Fan Festival. It’s happening under the tents at Sen̓áḵw–Vanier Park.
What do the world's most famous playwright and the world's most spectated sport have to do with each other? Bard on the Beach’s new adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor seems to be placing its bets on the ability of both soccer and Shakespearean comedy to make a crowd feel good together. After all, who can resist the call of a stadium wave, or a dirty joke that's survived more than four centuries?
Those unconvinced may remain so, and fair enough. But writer Bruce Horak and cowriter and director Rebecca Northan make a persuasive case in this adaptation, if only because they signal from the opening whistle that their primary goal is laughter. Thankfully, the laughs arrive pretty much nonstop.
Enter a fictional Vancouver suburb named Windsor. Athleisure replaces Elizabethan frocks, and a community centre becomes the hub where the play’s bawdy cast of schemers, lovers, and busybodies gathers. Enter, too, a city currently swept up in World Cup fever, and what you get is this spirited, contemporary take on one of the lesser-known Bard comedies. The soccer element is, admittedly, a bit of a gimmick, but it is a shrewd one.
It helps that Merry Wives accommodates experimentation so well. With its prose-heavy dialogue and focus on ordinary people rather than kings, nobles, or star-crossed lovers, it’s widely considered one of Shakespeare’s more accessible and adaptable comedies. This is the fourth time Bard on the Beach has staged the play—the last production relocated the action to Windsor, Ontario, in the 1960s—and it’s easy to see why directors keep returning to its script, which invites contemporary references, broad comic invention, and more than a little mischief.
The plot, as delightfully flimsy as it is, follows the broke Falstaff (Ashley Wright as Shakespeare’s beloved comic character), here reimagined as a retired soccer star. In this rendition, he returns to his hometown and sets out to seduce two married women for their money. His targets are the titular wives of Windsor, Mrs. Page (Jennifer Lines) and Mrs. Ford (Melissa Oei). What Falstaff doesn't realize is that the women quickly see through his scheme and join forces to devise one of their own.
In the subplot, Anne Page, captain of the women’s soccer team (Rachel Angco gives her a welcome steadiness), falls in love with Fenton, captain of the men's team (played with effortless likability by Cameron Grant), while her parents try to set her up with suitors who are each less appealing than the last.
Ashley Wright and Melissa Oei in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Photo by Emily Cooper
Reprising the role of Falstaff, Wright knows exactly how much room the character occupies and wears his slick vanity like a well-worn tracksuit. His performance keeps the shameless conman buoyant even as the indignities begin to pile up.
There’s a lot of joy to be found in the camaraderie between Lines and Oei as Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford. Their shared fun at Falstaff's expense spills into two locker-room dance numbers, where Lisa Goebel's choreography leans gleefully into the women’s shenanigans.
If the wives spend the evening delighting in the chaos, Mr. Ford spends it suffering through it, and Craig Erickson finds considerable comic mileage in the character’s spiralling paranoia. Ford’s jealousy belongs in a Shakespearean tragedy, and in Merry Wives it repeatedly curdles into something almost tragic before being swept right back into absurdity.
The rest of the ensemble proves just as game at navigating the production's heightened comic register. Steffanie Davis’s Ms. Quickly delivers common sense and the sass to go along with it, as well as some of the evening’s most memorable musical moments alongside Jacob Leonard's unexpectedly lovestruck Pistol. Raf Rogers’s Dr. Caius draws big laughs as a petulant chiropractor whose Frenchness is impossibly over-the-top, in keeping with Shakespeare's original text. Sara Vickruck's Slender is reimagined as a hapless aspiring influencer, brazenly peppering the dialogue with Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang.
It’s all very silly and bizarre, but amid the farce, the production occasionally gives moments of surprising familiarity. One of my favourite recurring gags sees Sebastian Kroon’s Bardolph cycle through a slew of jobs at the community centre, including leading a yoga class that predictably goes tits up, though in a way that will still feel relatable to anyone who has found themselves in a similar situation.
Whether it’s background characters exercising or wandering through the space, there’s an observant, no-frills sense of place to contrast the ridiculousness. And at times, the view beyond the tent of cyclists, joggers, and passerbys wandering through Vanier Parks rhymes with the one onstage. Amir Ofek’s set design effectively builds on that simple, lived-in feeling. The green-tiled Windsor Community and Athletic Centre transforms with impressive ease into locker rooms, watering holes, and reception areas, all while keeping a sense of a single bustling public space. (Maybe the only gripe is that one wishes our own community centres had the budget to offer saunas, soccer fields, fencing, and life-drawing classes all under one roof.)
Barbara Clayden’s costume design takes a similar approach, with down-to-earth costuming that makes the characters feel like people you could easily encounter walking down the street.
Beyond some jerseys, a mascot, and a few well-placed jokes, cynics and skeptics may be redeemed to know that soccer remains mostly a matter of atmosphere. The real attraction is the comedy itself: broad in its humour but firmly rooted in its Vancouver setting, and eager for the audience to join in on the fun. Like a stadium wave, The Merry Wives of Windsor asks very little beyond a willingness to join in the fun. Andudging by the response under the tents, that seems a wager worth making. 
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