Merry Wives and Bowery!

The Merry Wives of Windsor is playing at Shakespeare’s Globe and we grabbed a £5 standing ticket.  This is one of Shakespeare’s sitcom plays with short, silly episodes of mucking about.  The Globe is good at this stuff, and fairly quickly had us all laughing along.  This is the one where Falstaff decides to seduce two married women to get himself some cash, but they decide to trick him back.  Lots of over the top characters squeezing every laugh and double entendre they can out of every line, it was a lot of fun.  The treatment of Falstaff (played with cheeky charm by George Fouracres) at the end was perhaps a bit much for a modern audience so although it’s made light of there was also some uncomfortable shuffling of feet around me.  And I liked the way that they brought out the unpleasantness of Mistress Ford’s husband, which stays unresolved and leaves a bit of a sour taste.  But just under 3 hours of good quality entertainment for a fiver is an absolute bargain. 

Beforehand, we popped into Tate Modern to see the Bowery! Exhibition which finishes next week.  Leigh Bowery was a fashion designer and artist, part of the London and New York post-punk art and gay scene in the 80s and 90s.  He was plugged into all sorts of artistic trends of the time, with extravagant fashion, a participant in the Alternative Miss World contest (one year it was cancelled because the residents of Chiselhurst were worried about getting AIDS ….🤷) and a variety of performance art which pushed all sorts of boundaries.  He also collaborated with other artists, including Sue Tilley (see portrait on the left) and Boy George and it was interesting to see the video of ‘Generations of Love’, never released because of its 'explicit' nature.  He was connected to the more mainstream art world through his collaboration as a muse and friend of Lucian Freud and some of his portraits are here too. 

Sadly Bowery died of an AIDS related illness in 1994, so we never got to see what he would have done next.  The exhibition was fascinating for looking at a time when there was an explosion of creativity but in the days before social media, those sub and countercultural movements were largely hidden and just leaked into mainstream view.