Brighton Year-Round 2026
Falstaff
The Ellen Terry Barn Theatre Society, Matt Turpin, Zo Biba Leonard.
Genre: Adaptation, Classical and Shakespeare, Comedy, Costume, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre
Venue: The Lantern Theatre, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Review
“A giant!” Or is it, like Snug’s lion nothing but roaring? The Lantern shudders. The early 1990s RSC dramatisation of Robert Nye’s 1976 novel Falstaff by David Weston was trialled in three versions. With Weston’s blessing it was adapted in 2022 by actor Mike Stoneham who rides again (I use the term advisedly), starring Stoneham. Originally directed by Peter Mould it’s freshly tweaked by Stoneham and Matt Turpin. It reached the Lantern Theatre, Brighton on April 4 and tours to other venues (see below).
Lasting eighty minutes straight through, or sometimes (as here) with an interval, it’s not for the faint-farted. Erect in his costume with props including a throne-like chair and bottle-strewn table, realised by Suzi Falber Crick, Stoneham lays history about him with a will. Or without Will altogether. Stoneham’s presence thrubs even in brief silences. Usually with a jar of sack pressed against his mouth.
Falstaff won the Hawthornden and Guardian Fiction prizes. Nevertheless in 1976, Reading University library saw a solemn ritual: a copy of the just-published and double award-winning novel was ritually burned by members of the English faculty, led by Professor Gordon. Fictional heresy towards a great fiction was punishable by – burning. You’d think it was Joan of Arc. And she (inside) was burned again within it.
Nye though proposes nothing as simple as a squint on Falstaff in the Rabelasian 1970s. Here as realised and carefully filleted by both Weston and Stoneham, Nye’s Falstaff slyly conflates Shakespeare’s Falstaff, braggart, coward and Rabelaisian friend of Prince Hal, with the real Sir John Falstof (1380-1459). Someone who really was at most of those later Hundred Years war battles: from before Agincourt through the campaigns of Joan of Arc and long after, resulting in an accusation of cowardice, later overturned. It’s all related here too. Weston wasn’t the first either. In 1981 (repeated 1982) David Buck dramatised and starred in his own memorable version for Radio 3.
But this as Stoneham’s Falstaff proves, is Shakespeare’s liar. One who fought at the naval battle of Sluys in 1340 – energetically realised here by Stoneham mimicking a fifteen-year-old frigging about in the rigging. Yet who’s only 81 in 1459, the year of his death. Which one stands up? Again, there’s a double meaning in that. So, as Olivier’s former Nazi once chillingly asked in The Marathon Man (also 1976): “Is it safe?”
Well, no. Neither Shakespeare nor history is safe. Not even Shakespeare’s Falstaff. But this is the 2020s, not 1970s. Our tolerance levels for a chapter on farts, another on a nose that never quite gets to the nose, incest and sexploits might be less than it was. Stoneham and Turpin see this. Luckily this Falstaff is still amusingly offensive, but outrageous? Leaf through the original 456 pages, and 100 short chapters. Then you’ll see how decorous Stoneham is. Not very. But just enough, and still not enough for some.
Stoneham starts out memorably with the opening peroration and Falstaff’s begetting on the giant of Cerne Abbas. On a particular chalky length of him. And so Stoneham intones the Falstaffian roar and rib-tickling of young Falstaff, his parents, his early service under the Duke of Mowbray (here reverting to the historic and later Fastolf) and that much earlier sea-battle. After detailing his exploits we’re suddenly about 60 years on and in familiar territory: though Falstaff claims he’s a lot younger here than presented by Shakespeare. Well, he’s 81, not 134!
Nye and Stoneham twist familiar things so we hear that it’s only Falstaff who hears Hal’s promise about banishment at the end of the moment when Falstaff was briefly King Henry IV. “I do. I will.” Stoneham realises this with a drop in temperature.
It’s a difficult work not to roar out most of the time. The story’s unrelentingly rich and noisy. Perhaps we’re grateful the sound effects were only related, not enacted. There’s moments from both Henry IVs and the Merry Wives – whom Falstaff insists he did sleep with, and particularly enjoyed Mistress Ford’s liveliness. Indeed Falstaff overleaps his own demise as reported in Henry V, to boast of his noting how for instance Hal became “a touch of Harry in the night”; though not in any renewal of their friendship. There’s his defence of the baggage train. And discovery of Davy Gam, the boy who left the service of Pistol and the others but was tragically slaughtered.
Naturally Nye’s brilliance here extends to injecting that real Fastolf’s exploits as a continuation in the same vein as his augmented mountain of mummy, that afflatus of sack. It allows for a coup, a religious plea and a return. Stoneham has the measure of a sudden religious plea; and some flicker of awe at the death of Joan of Arc, relating the soldier’s action. (Let’s not spoil a good story, but the real Fastolf was a learned man: his fortune, unique battle/strategy notes and library was bequeathed to Magdalen College Oxford, founded a year before he died. And let’s not even go into John Oldcastle)
I write with partiality: as a friend of Robert Nye (we shared a mentor, Martin Seymour-Smith), and knowing where his sensibility truly lay (more delicate than his Falstaff, as proved in many letters). Nye was fascinated by this vein, as novels like The Memoirs of Lord Byron (1989) and Gilles de Rais (1990) prove. He wished to exorcise it to a degree. His final novel The Late Mr Shakespeare (1998) is a masterpiece that does that. Afterwards, Nye gratefully returned full-time to his truest calling: his acclaimed poetry.
So it’s wonderful to see this filleted version revived, and Stoneham’s various arts tackle it. Stoneham can roar with the best, though not too often, and on one occasion like a dove (as Bottom claims he might do). He manages a few silences, and perhaps there might be more of this, as when he also fines down his voice to that moment of Hal’s promised banishment. In other words, the pathos and devastation that’s also at the kernel of Nye’s – and Shakespeare’s – vision. Beyond this, Stoneham jumps and clambers with some agility. You fear for anyone with such limited props options. There might be a more varietal pitch and toss with the cup of sack and a little more stage business, but this is a still-evolving magnificence. Stoneham deserves acclaim for this one-man tour-de-farce, that keeps the Rabelaisian fires burning.
Tour dates:
17th April – Players Theatre, Thame
5th & 6th May – Alma Tavern, Bristol
9th June – Quay Theatre, Sudbury (Suffolk)
Produced by The Ellen Terry Barn Theatre Society, Matt Turpin, Zo Biba Leonard. Photo Credit Peter Mould. Poster Design Cliff Brooker, Costume and Props Suzi Falber Crick.
Thanks to Pete Constick and the Winchelsea Corportion, to Rachel Kimber and Jonathan Murphy.
Special Thanks to Karl Howman and David Weston, without whom this project would not have been possible.
