Word: scenes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this play was invested it could never have survived for three hours. It has often been noted, that it is very hard to swallow Falstaff's incredible obtuseness. In part we are meant to lay it up to lust; for this he is burnt by candles in the final scene...
...even this lust cannot explain the extent to which he has decayed since Henry IV. Three times he is totally humiliated. It was easy to laugh each time but successively less so, and if it were not for the utter charm which permeated the last scene it would have been difficult to accept it at all. This scene, though perhaps a bit of an addendum, was like Midsummer Night's Dream all over again...
...Hands amplified it. Falstaff fled up a tree and looked down in horror at the invasion of fairies below him. A torch was set in the tree beneath him, and an ensuing, very loud explosion threw him from the tree ten feet to the ground. This gave the final scene both an additional element of farce, and a mystery which partially vindicated the absurdity of Falstaff's last humiliation...
Nunn set the scene in the half-light and intermittent flashes of the storm, and had a huge (about 12 feet tall) and very realistic bear rise out of the blackness behind Antigonus, pick him bodily up, and carry him off, the final action drowned in a scream of loud and hopeless terror, amplified, so that it reverberated in the ear drums. The whole thing was terrifying and convincing, as it should be. The switch, then, to the Shepherd and his son the Clown, was entirely in keeping with the Shepherd's words...
...they had stepped in to prevent the militants from turning the demonstration the Mobe had so carefully organized into a scene of senseless, polarizing violence. A young Mobe marshal moved down the sidewalk pleading with the crowd through his megaphone, "This is not an official Mobe demonstration. Will all those not connected with this demonstration please leave this area...