The PlayPerhaps it’s the Windsor reputation for spunky spouses that persuades two down-on-their-luck out-of-towners, Falstaff and Fenton, to journey there and pursue merry wives of their own. Both of their wife-wagers, though, have the numbers stacked against them. Falstaff, gambling most irresponsibly, chooses two women who are already husbanded and who are best friends. And Fenton, though he more sensibly pursues only the one woman, has two rivals, either one preferred by the young woman’s mother and father. Their odds are, shall we say, two to one on for the old fat rogue and three to one against the young chancer...

... its general power, that power by which all works of genius shall finally be tried, is such, that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator, who did not think it too soon at an end. Samuel Johnson, 1765

... this delightful comedy is perfect, if the term perfection can be applied to any creation of human genius. William Oxberry, 1820

... the mastermind... produces one of the finest comedies of all time--the greatest tribute to womanhood as a whole, of whom Elizabeth was chief, and the most delicately con-ceived and most poetically expressed compliment to his Royal Mistress. Rosa Grindon, 1902

Alice Ford and Margaret Page wage an undercover women’s war in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Set in motion by the wives’ need to combat slander, sexual assault, and jealousy, Merry Wives seems designed to appeal to female audiences, whether or not it was brought into being by the desires of a powerful female spectator who wanted to see Falstaff in love. The play goes out of its way to demonstrate the value of good alliances and performance skills for women who were faced with sexual aggressors and unwanted seducers, pests who harassed married women almost as often as they did maids and widows. Pamela Allen Brown, 2003

The Critics

Cast

Hugh Evans / FentonEzra Bix

Dr Caius / PistolBernard Caleo

Anne Page / HostJing-Xuan Chan

FalstaffTom Considine

Mistress Quickly / NymDonna Dimovski-Kantarovski

Slender / Rugby / RobinTom Heath

Mistress Page / BardolphHelen Hopkins

Mistress Ford / Justice Shallow Carole Patullo

Page / Will PageAlex Pinder

Ford / SimpleJames Wardlaw

Production

DirectorRob Conkie

DesignerEloise Kent

Assistant DirectorMelissa Viola

Stage ManagerJack Wilkinson

Production AssistantAlison Bice

Company ManagerPam Bond

ArtworkErika Von Kaschke

School LiaisonMelissa Kirkham

PatronBob White, Earl of Fremantle

Tom Considine graduated from Flinders University Drama Centre in 1975. Since then he has appeared with many companies including The Melbourne Theatre Company, Playbox, The Sydney Theatre Com-pany, The State Theatre of S.A., Anthill, The Mill Theatre, Eureka!, La Mama, The Eleventh Hour and Not Yet Its Difficult. He was a founding member of The Mill Theatre Company and The Five Dollar Theatre Company and has also performed with The Astra Choir and The Early Music Festival. His film and television credits include: Deeper than Blue, Blue Heelers, Stingers, Corelli, Man from Snowy River, and The Heroes. In 2003 he received a Green Room award for his performance in Stephen Sewell’s Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America. He was nominated for a Green Room award for his performance of Falstaff in 2012.

Tom Considine

Ezra Bix trained at NIDA and, most recently, has toured Australia with Phillip Quast in Yes, Prime Minister, John Wood in The Club and David Suchet in The Last Confession, which also toured America and Canada. For many years he toured to India, China and throughout Australasia in the comedy The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – Abridged (IMG International). He has appeared in Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew for the Australian Shakespeare Company and last appeared at fortyfivedownstairs in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me. TV credits include: Offspring, Rush, Adam Hills in Gordon Street Tonight, Bush Slam, The Secret Life Of Us, MDA, Murder Call, Janus, Embassy, and The Feds in Australia, and Class Act; To Play The King; and The Knock in the UK.

Ezra Bix

Bernard Caleo first performed with Helen Hopkins in 1986 at St Martins in the musical Runaways, directed by Malcolm Robertson (R.I.P). With Bruce Woolley, he devised and performed the two-man superhero show Miracleman. For the last 20 years he has been making fact-based theatre for galleries, museums and cultural spaces: e.g. for CSIRO, the one-man show Faraday’s Candle, based on lectures by the English scientist Michael Faraday. In 2014 at the La Mama Carlton Courthouse he played Frederick Burnaby in The Great Game. Over the past few years he has been working with the Japanese pictures+nar-ration storytelling system kamishibai (‘paper theatre’) and toured with Polyglot Theatre to the tsunami-damaged town of Minamisanriku in Japan in 2015. He also makes comics: www.cardigancomics.com

Bernard Caleo

Cast Biographies

Alex Pinder has worked as an actor, director and teacher of theatre for over 30 years: www.alexpinder.com. Theatre and TV credits in 2015 include: performing in The Dead Twin (Theatre Works festival of new works, Footscray Community Arts Centre), directing a reading of Rashma Kalsie’s The Day I Left Home (MTC Neon Festival), and roles in Neighbours and the children’s series MAKO3. Alex also facilitates workshops in drama and clowning with vulnerable communities in Nepal and India (Artists in Community International: www.artistsincommunity.me).

Alex Pinder

Jing-Xuan Chan

Jing-Xuan Chan graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006 and has performed in theatre productions both locally and with the Seals Players Company in Hong Kong including Dancing at Lughnasa, Three Sisters, Pericles, and a Cantonese production of Othello. Her television and film credits include City Homicide, Dirt Game, Winners and Losers and Happy Country. She has also worked on various audio books and au-dio plays, one of which was part of the Next Wave Festival. Jing-Xuan also enjoys teaching Speech and Drama and has attained her A.T.C.L Associate Diploma in Speech and Drama and has worked as a co-director and as a drama tutor on several youth productions in Hong Kong.

Carole Patullo

Carole Patullo has been an actor, teacher, improviser, and writer, for 33 years. She has appeared with many independent and mainstream theatre companies and has been nominated for four Green Room Awards. Perfor-mance highlights include: After Dinner (MTC), Storming St Kilda by Tram (Theatreworks), In Cahoots (Arena), The Lost Story of The Magdalene Asy-lum (Peepshow inc), Charitable Intent and Shedding (La Mama), A Man For All Seasons (Complete Works), A Black Joy and Topsy (fortyfivedown-stairs). Most recently she performed (and co-wrote) Button, which was included on the 2013 VCE Drama list and toured in 2014-15. Feature film and television appearances include: Lake Mungo, My Year without Sex, City Homicide, Winners and Losers, and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.

Tom Heath made his debut in 2002 in the children’s chorus of Opera Australia, playing in Carmen, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Verdi’s Otello. At VCA he played the title role in Agamemnon, Kulygin in Three Sisters, Father Flynn in Doubt, Oliver/Corin/William in As You Like It and Edward Kynaston in The Compleat Female Stage Beauty. Other recent credits include: Kindness (Theatreworks), Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (Melbourne Fringe Festival) and Chansonnier in H.K. Gruber’s Frankenstein!! with the SSO Fellowship. Tom has completed his Honours at VCA in which he examined the link between Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory and Shakespeare’s written language. Tom Heath

Helen Hopkins co-founded The Shift Theatre with Carolyn Bock, and has appeared in their productions of Two Sisters and a Piano and Fred (Dog Theatre, Footscray). Together they have written, produced and performed in The Girls in Grey, about Australian army nurses during World War I (Theatre Works and national tour). The Girls in Grey was on the VCE curriculum for Drama in 2012 and is published by Currency Press. Helen has over forty theatre credits with companies and theatres such as The Australian Shakespeare Company, Performing Arts Projects, La Mama, Es-sential Theatre, Soul Theatre and Hoy Polloy. Other theatre credits include Away (MTC), The Women’s Jail Project (Dublin Fringe Festival), and It’s My Party (and I’ll die if I want to) (Hole in the Wall). Helen has featured in lead roles in the films The Marey Project, Hamlet X, Ghost Paintings 1-4 and Sensitive New Age Killer (SNAK).

Helen Hopkins

James Wardlaw

James Wardlaw was one of the original members of the Bell Shakespeare Company. His credits for them include Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Other Shakespeare credits include Romeo and Juliet (The M.O.D.D. Show) (MTC, MSO, VSO and Australian Ballet co-production), The Taming of the Shrew (Elston, Hocking and Jane) and Romeo and Juliet (PITC). His other theatre credits include Uncle Vanya in Avoca and The Visit (La Mama); The Crucible, The Hypocrite, Three Sisters, The Balcony, Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Grapes of Wrath (MTC); Black, Falling Petals, So Wet, Violet Inc., Baby X, Crazy Brave and A Return To The Brink (Malthouse/Playbox); The Nest (The Hayloft project); Dictionary of Imaginary Places (MIAF); Penelope, NSFW and Middletown (Red Stitch); The Barretts of Wimpole St (QTC) and The Normal Heart (Theatreworks). Film and television credits include Turkey Shoot, Redball, Dark Love Story, Inspector Gadget 2, Gallipoli, Blue Heelers, City Homicide, Stingers, Good Guys Bad Guys, MDA, Janus, Seachange, Backberner, The Hollow Men and Howard, The Mild Colonial Boy. James is a NIDA graduate and a proud member of Actors Equity since 1988.

Donna Dimovski-Kantarovski received a BFA (Bachelor in Acting) in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1993, after which she played many leading roles for the Bitola National Theatre (1994-1998) in Macedonia. She is a multiple award winner at the Macedonian National Theatre Festival. Donna is the Founder of the Performing Arts School Bodzilak (training in theatre for young people in the Macedonian language) and is the Artistic Director of The Duchess Theatre. Recent theatre credits include: Sarajevo Suite (La Mama and Bit Fest, Macedonia) and Medea (Eagle’s Nest).

Donna Dimovski-Kantarovski

Symposium

The Merry Wives of Windsor17 February, 10 am – 4 pm

Arts Lecture Room 5 (G61), Arts Building UWA

Chairs: Peter Reynolds (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) and Bob White (UWA)

10.00 – 11.00 Rob Conkie (La Trobe University) and Merry Wives castThree-Dimensional Criticism

11.30 – 12.30 Elizabeth Schafer (Royal Holloway, University of London) Visual pleasure and The Merry Wives of Windsor in performance

12.30 – 13.30 Alison Findlay (Lancaster University)‘To Give Our Hearts United Ceremony’ (4.6.50): Managing Emotions in The Merry Wives of Windsor

13.30 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 15.00 Helen Ostovich (McMaster University)Laughter in The Merry Wives of Windsor: Performance as Research for Digital Editing

15.00 – 16.00 Philippa Kelly (Resident Dramaturg, The California State Theater)Adventures in Dramaturgy: Women and Wooers

16.00 – 16.30 Bob White (UWA) Merry Afterlives