Best Shakespeare productions: The Merry Wives of Windsor

I've always had a soft spot for this play. Long patronised by academics, it's Shakespeare's only purely English comedy, pins down middle-class mores to perfection and almost always works in the theatre. It also yielded one of Verdi's greatest operas.

Two productions I remember chiefly for portrayals of the manically jealous Ford. In Terry Hands's 1968 production, Ian Richardson looked, as one critic said, "as if he were being bounced on a trampoline". In a 1979 version by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, Ben Kingsley was like some permanently erupting Thames Valley Othello. But the production that did most to change our perspective was the 1985 production by Bill Alexander, which set the action in a recognisable 1950s world, with Lindsay Duncan and Janet Dale as the witty wives seen plotting under the hairdryer. Peter Jeffrey was a raffish, and faintly RAF-ish, Falstaff.

That set the tone for a series of updated versions, of which my favourite was, easily, the most recent. In 2012, Phillip Breen came up with a joyous Stratford production set in a sharply defined modern Windsor-on-Avon. Desmond Barrit was a magnificent Falstaff, seen disco-dancing at one point to the strains of Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On. Alexandra Gilbreath as, in Libby Purves's choice phrase, "a yummy-mummy Mistress Ford in tight jeans" and Sylvestra le Touzel as a sensible, green-wellied Meg Page were both spot on. John Ramm's Ford, venomously hissing into an empty buck-basket, was a model of middle-class delusion. Why, I wonder, was this glorious production never seen again?

• What are your favourite versions of The Merry Wives of Windsor? Let us know in the comments below

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