rugger bugger

ストラトフォード・アポン・エイヴォンでThe Merry Wives of Windsor (『ウィンザーの陽気な女房たち』初演1597-1602年?) が上演されました。この劇はエリザベス朝イングランドのミドル・クラスが描かれており、シェイクスピアの作品のなかでも唯一の現代劇として捉えられています。記事を読んでみるとup-to-dateに置き換えているようですが、青字の箇所のような演出もしているとのことで、非常に興味を持ちました。

監督とデザイナーの仕事っぷりがとくに良いようです。John Rammが演じるFrank Fordの演技も賞賛に値するようです。

劇では、登場人物のPageとFordについてageing rugger-buggersという演出がされています。このrugger-buggerはイングランドの俗語で「活気はあるけれども、役に立たない上流階級の男」という意味です(cf. Hooray Henry)。それぞれ辞書を参照しましたが、Wiktionaryでは、“someone rich or posh, who stereotypically plays rugby, and who can be loud and unpleasant to other people”と定義されています。(Othello)

The Merry Wives of Windsor – review | Stage | The Guardian

Breen and designer Max Jones make every scene rivetingly specific. Ford and Page, whose wives Falstaff sets out to seduce, are a couple of ageing rugger-buggers who meet up at the end of a match: there is also a clear distinction between Alexandra Gilbreath's saucy, snazzily clad Alice Ford and Sylvestra le Touzel's sensible, green-wellied Meg Page. Even the Garter Inn becomes a recognisably modern pub which, in the course of an obscure hoax, stages a German weekend with the host kitted out in Bavarian lederhosen. Only the climactic scene in Windsor Forest, with Falstaff disguised as Herne the Hunter, seems to belong to the first, rather than the second, Elizabethan age.

But that matters little since Breen has assembled an exceptionally strong cast. Desmond Barrit has now made Falstaff very much his own and invests him with a tattered dignity and immense sexual vanity: left alone, he constantly holds a mirror up to nature in the form of his private parts. John Ramm is also the funniest Ford since Ben Kingsley: his jealousy leads him into a gleaming mania, as when he hisses venomously at a totally empty buck-basket in which he thinks Falstaff is secreted, yet there is also an edge of pathos to his delusion. And Anita Dobson makes Mistress Quickly a totally believable housekeeper, afflicted by a terrifying deference to her alleged superiors.