Set for revival at the RSC, this perfectly structured revenge comedy has an earthy vitality that no aristo or scholar could have created

I have a question for those theatrical luminaries (and I’m looking at you Sir Mark and Sir Derek) who doubt the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Do they seriously believe that a capricious aristo such as the Earl of Oxford or a legalistic scholar like Francis Bacon could have written The Merry Wives of Windsor? In case they have forgotten, this brilliant comedy – about to be revived by the RSC – shows the middle classes getting their revenge on a knightly predator, Sir John Falstaff. It could only have been written by someone who understood the intricacies of a close-knit, provincial community.

What strikes me about the play is its quintessential Englishness, and you see this in myriad ways. One is in the earthy vitality of the language. There is a classic example when Anne Page, offered the prospect of marriage to a preposterous Frenchman, says: “Alas, I had rather be set quick i’th’earth / And bowled to death with turnips.” It is an extraordinarily vivid image and one of the play’s rare excursions into verse: 90% of it is in prose. But the language throughout has a localised vigour that stems from a writer steeped in English life. At one point Mistress Ford urges her servants to take the buck-basket containing Falstaff and “carry it among the whisters in Datchet Mead.” The “whisters” were the bleachers of linen who could be seen by any English river bank including the Avon.

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
The RSC’s European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize-winning play tailors its intriguing characters a little too neatly

Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s opening season as co-directors of the RSC continues with a second first. After “a carnival adaptation” of Hanif Kureshi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia, co-written by the author along with director Emma Rice (and reviewed by my colleague Susannah Clapp), is this European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer prize-winning play, English.

Anisha Fields’s set is, unmistakably, a classroom: a frosted-glass wall, neon strip lighting, metal-legged tables, plastic bucket chairs and a whiteboard next to a door. Into the space strides Marjan. Beneath the heading “TOEFL – Test of English as a Foreign Language”, she writes: “English Only”, then underlines the words, once, twice, three times. Lightly played by Nadia Albina, this is deliciously funny. As the action progresses, however, the imperative instruction becomes a motor for identity crises and personality clashes among the characters (who speak English throughout: fluently when communicating in their native Farsi; haltingly in the target language).

English is at the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 1 June, then transfers to the Kiln, London, 5-29 June