The Merry Wives of Windsor review: The RSC’s bubbly production at the Barbican is Shakespeare for the TOWIE generation

If you don’t think Shakespeare comedies are, well, a laugh, then this version of The Merry Wives of Windsor is for you. Derided by critics as the time Shakespeare phoned it in, this production by the Royal Shakespeare Company takes those toffee noses and rubs them in smut. And it’s delicious.

It begins with a fictitious scene in which an off-stage Shakespeare receives a letter from an animated talking-head Elizabeth I asking why on earth that hilarious fat knight Sir John Falstaff wasn’t in his upcoming history play. In pure Miranda Richardson style, she demands he write a new play – in two weeks – starring Falstaff and she bloody well wants to see him in love, OK?

The cast then parades on to a series of character titles and cheesy music reminiscent of shoulder-padded 80s soap operas like Dynasty or, more recently, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Yet, as before, Falstaff attempts to woo two married women who set him up for a public humiliation to teach him a lesson, while the young ingenue of the village has to choose between three possible suitors. All the while, the men don disguises to catch their wives at it, and end up making a fool of themselves, too.

Though its titular setting is Windsor, this could easily have been set in Essex and the script even hints at the county, changing the Fat Lady of Brentford to the Fat Lady of Brentwood.

The set consists of two swivelling mock-Tudor structures that suffice as a pretty Home Counties village, and a pub called the Garter Inn, all the better to house the Hostess of the Garter, who in this version is a leopard-printed landlady with more in common with Dorien from Birds of a Feather than the Duchess of Wherever.

She’s the only character that is overdone in this production – maybe it’s all the thrusting – as the rest are perfectly pitched. Despite the heightened language, the wives could slot right into Gavin & Stacey, and the audience roared as they dragged out Elizabethan love letters in their Estuary drawl.

But it’s the details that tickle; the inflatable flamingos from Love Island, the gleaming white teeth of suitor Slender and the nod to Little England that is the residents-only parking sign on the corner of the street.

Purists are not going to like the liberties that have been taken, from the insertion of the “Fenton” internet meme to Falstaff being pushed into a rancid wheelie bin then a canal, rather than a basket then a canal.

But, frankly, who cares about those people? This production doesn’t, because it knows that if there’s any Shakespeare play that should escape the preciousness of the purist, it’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.