YOU will note the Windsor postal address of the Merry Wives has been removed, not out of any aversion to the southern town but because the Broadsides' emphasis is on a northern re-mix of Shakespeare's plays. What's more, as company actor-manager and director Barrie Rutter argues, "Windsor is surely not the only place fit to set an English comedy", particularly one with a contemporary, universal resonance.

Rutter, co-director Conrad Nelson and their designer Jessica Worrall set Shakespeare's tale of love and lust, sex and lies, status and social snobbery, as much in Emmerdale and Vicar Of Dibley terrain as Windsor, dressing the production in country attire, all waistcoats, sports jackets, corduroys and checks.

The Merry Wives was written as a comic showcase for bellicose, boozy, blustering Sir John Falstaff - a big hit in the Henry IV histories - in the Shakespearean equivalent of the television spin-off series of today. Inevitably, given Rutter's love of bravura performance, bearded Barrie himself fills the Falstaff role, albeit with the aid of ample padding to aid his rambling gait and to set off his Panama and an assortment of ties from which even a clown might shy away.

Yet this is no mere one-man show, a night of comeuppance and lecherous hiccups for this Toad of Toad Hall figure. Broadsides have always relished ensemble playing and dramas with cut-and-counter thrust, collisions and clashes to match their abrasive, highly physical use of language. Be it Maggie Ollenrenshaw's glam Mistress Ford or Joanna Swain's no-nonsense Mistress Page spinning their web of deception to capture Falstaff, or Conrad Nelson's exasperated Welsh clergyman, Sir Hugh Evans, there is a joyful gambolling to the brisk, bustling performance, but with the necessary venom in the final sting in the tale.

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