THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
Published in the Stratford Herald, 3rd April 2026
On Wednesday morning, I found out that my friend Des Barrit had died. I was heading in to my first day of technical rehearsals at Chicago Shakespeare Theater for The Merry Wives Of Windsor.He’d been on my mind of course as I revisited the play for the first time since the autumn of 2012. So we’d been in text communication, I was able to tell him I loved him and that I thought he was a genius. I will always cherish the text he sent back.
We shared many memories of his last great Stratford role, Falstaff, of actors, of old friends.The defining memory of that period was him walking on stage and the audience breaking in to a spontaneous round of applause. Just for walking on to the stage. He waited patiently for it to end and began in that fruity Welsh baritone, with a note of coquettish faux innocence “Maaastah Shalloooow, you’ll complaaain of MEE to the Queen?”. And after applause: laughter. It’s the way you tell ‘em. An audience beaming, sat back in their seats, relaxed, at the feet of a master ready to go wherever he wanted to take them.
When I was fourteen, I was reluctantly put on a school trip to Stratford, scowling for the whole journey down form Merseyside. Its not an exaggeration to say that I returned a different person. From the back row of the old RST, I had seen Des Barritt play Malvolio in Ian Judge’s glorious 1994 production of Twelfth Night. I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be as funny as he was in that production. I didn’t know Shakespeare from a bar of soap, but there was this magician, wringing laughs out of a strange, expansive new language that I didn’t always get, but through Des, completely understood. I was opened up with laughter, and then new complex emotions rushed in as the play became darker, I wanted to cry. I was fourteen. I didn’t know what to do with it all. I became a theatre director.
I think I was something like the ninth director to be asked to direct The Merry Wives at Stratford in 2012. Des was attached to play Falstaff, and I was one of a few directors that were sent to meet him by Sir Michael Boyd in a coffee shop at Seven Dials. Des was bundled in the corner (to reference Dylan Thomas) ‘like a buffalo in an airing cupboard’. A mountain. I was a child again. I had probably over prepared to meet my hero and had planned to wow him with my thinking. Just as I opened my mouth and my notebook, he said “listen, put that away. I’ve heard it all before. Just tell me. Is it going to be funny?’. I nodded. And he picked me. He played Falstaff in that production like he’d been put on the earth to do so by a benevolent deity. I can remember just trying to carve out space for the his size of his brilliance. And he was very, very funny. Innocent, wise, loving, a little bit sad, a permanent joke on the lips, feet in the mud, eyes on the stars. Loved by his fellow actors and his audience. And he loved them back.
Des was a stage star. He was stage struck. He loved the theatre so much that in a break in the 2012 season, he went up to Sheringham in Norfolk to direct the panto, as he did every year. It’s been strange being back in a production that I made 14 years ago. In that post London Olympics aftermath, at the end of a kind of optimism and the beginning of something darker. But with the passing of our friend, the great comedian Desmond Barritt - made by Stratford, loved by Stratford - we see the passing of one of the last great stage stars too. Cliches are cliches for a reason, but we will never see his like again.
Wednesday in Chicago was sad. Difficult. Lots of texts from the UK. Hearing voices, catching fleeting images on the same set as our 2012 production. But I could hear Des, loud and clear. And yes, Dessie, I’ll stop moping and get on with it. And if its funny, that’s down to you.
PB