All's Well That Ends Well (24 page)
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Authors: William Shakespeare
While Milton Schulman argues that Bertram “is one of the most abused young men in Shakespeare” and that John Barton's production “seems determined, as far as Bertram is concerned, to correct a critical wrong”: “As interpreted by Ian Richardson, Bertram is harmless rather than wilful, amiable rather than cruel, weak rather than venal. He just doesn't want to get married.”
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Praise was extended to “Catherine Lacey's beautifully autumnal Countess,” Elizabeth Spriggs (the Widow), Helen Mirren (Diana), and Brewster Mason (Lafew).
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John Barton's 1967 RSC production with Ian Richardson as Bertram and Clive Swift as Parolles: “As interpreted by Ian Richardson, Bertram is harmless rather than wilful, amiable rather than cruel, weak rather than venal. He just doesn't want to get married.”
Trevor Nunn (1981)
Michael Billington in the
Guardian
described Trevor Nunn's production, with Mike Gwilym as Bertram and Harriet Walter as Helen, “a total masterpiece”:
Indeed, Nunn's great achievement is to have endowed a fairytale plot about a miracle-curing heroine and her defecting husband, with a total emotional reality. Partly he does this by updating the play to a precise Edwardian world in which class differences are crucial: thus the keys around Helena's waist tell us that she is a working girl down on the Countess of Rossillion's humane Chekhovian estate while Bertram, the object of her affection, is an aristocratic scion who at the Paris court becomes one of a bevy of fencing, vaulting, brandy-swilling St Cloud
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junior officers.
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In Billington's view, Harriet Walter “is no ruthless opportunist,” but rather “a love-struck heroine who knows she is up against an inflexible class-system,” while Mike Gwilym's Bertram is “a savage Strindbergian monster” (Philip Franks played a less monstrous, more “caddish” Bertram when the production transferred to the Barbican).
Tom Vaughan praised John Gunter's “Crystal Palace-style setting” as “brilliantly ingenious and evocative” but felt “a vital ingredient gets lost; this society is really medieval and the King and possibly the Countess as well have life and death powers over their subjects.”
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Helen was played as “a sombre, governessy girl”
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who faltered at the first hurdle when Bertram rejects her:
In the scene of choosing a husband, she had tried to prevent the King from joining their hands, and when she made her final appearance, Bertram “went to take her hand, but didn't actually do so; instead he spoke that cryptic, conditioned couplet.
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This wary meeting between husband and wife contrasted strikingly with Helena's intensely moving reunion with the Countessâ
â¦â
Left alone, Bertram and Helena walked upstage together, their hands still apart, the final image of an unequal marriage.”
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Sympathy for Helena can be detected in James Fenton's review: “In terms of the play, Helena's tricking of Bertram is a legitimate response to the challenge he issues to her. Helena never wrongs Bertram, however much he may feel wronged.”
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Others were less impressed with the moral turnaround:
There is a slight snag about such realism and this is that the bad characters are so much more likeable than the good ones. Harriet Walter's Helena is an admirable performance, but by God what a dull person this Helena turns out to be. The Florentine Diana, who lures the unfaithful Bertram to her bed but substitutes Helena in the darkâ
â¦â
is twice as much fun and Cheryl Campbell has a splendid time with her.
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The performances were likewise praised of Parolles (Stephen Moore); the “higher grade” comedy of Lafew (Robert Eddison) and Lavatch (Geoffrey Hutchings), “bent double like Rigoletto and, like Rigoletto, pretty contemptuous of the upper classes”; and Peggy Ashcroft's “true dignity” as the Countess. Ashcroft, whose performance was described as “perfect, noble, maternal, affectionate by turn,”
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imbued her words “with a sure, sad knowledge of the world.”
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Trevor Nunn's RSC production (1981) with Harriet Walter as “a sombre, governessy” Helen and Peggy Ashcroft as the Countess: “perfect, noble, maternal, affectionate by turn,” she imbued her words “with a sure, sad knowledge of the world.”
Barry Kyle (1989)
The theater program for Barry Kyle's 1989 production illustrates a world of toy soldiers, some marching to the beat of a drum and others blowing the bugle, astride a rocking horse. As Waller remarks, “Kyle opened the play with Bertram playing with toy soldiers, taking up the description of war as âa nursery to our gentry' [1.2.20].”
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Kyle offers a perfectly plausible account of two children growing up together, but unfortunately Patricia Kerrigan's Helen matures earlier than her playfellow, Bertram (Paul Venables). She is ready for a relationship but he is young and seeks adventure and glory with other boy soldiers. The potential tragedy of their situation is insisted
upon by Chris Dyer's permanent set, “a child's nursery complete with huge hobby-horse and three toy soldiers.”
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One critic praised “the achievement of coherence, remarkable in a play which sometimes appears to be a patchwork of fragments culled from other Shakespeare plays.”
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Kyle presents Helen's “sturdy self-assertion” in choosing Bertram for her husband as “an acceptable error” and shows her immediate “agonised realisation of her miscalculation.” For the “choosing” scene, the suitors had each a full-length mirror “by which they could set their images.”
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The illusory attraction of the world of toy soldiers became apparent when the angry King of France (Hugh Ross) struck Bertram for refusing Helen, forced their hands together and then threatened him with his sword. Bertram had no option but to take her hand and exit.
Michael Billington felt that the director had imposed an “artificial visual unity” on the play but that “Mr Kyle's most original idea is to preface the court scenes with images of Elizabeth and James I implying that Shakespeare, writing around 1603, was lamenting the loss of a vanished Golden Age.”
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In one interview Kyle admitted that he had toyed with the idea of setting
All's Well That Ends Well
in the City of London in 1989, with characters setting off to the wars by helicopter. The themes he finds in the play, of “an old world being supplanted by a new world and new values, new money,” had obvious and tempting parallels with 1980s Britain.
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Opinions were divided over Paul Venables as Bertram who was accused of giving “an over-diagrammatic performance,” which suggested that “buried deep down, Bertram may harbour a secret affection for his enforced bride.”
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The production was described as a “cop-out” that offered the spectator “a boring compromise.”
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Certainly, the unambiguous ending showed Bertram, Helen, and the Countess locked in embrace.
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Barry Kyle's 1989 RSC production with Patricia Kerrigan as Helena: for the “choosing” scene, the suitors had each a full-length mirror “by which they could set their images.” The illusory attraction of the world of toy soldiers became apparent.
While Gwen Watford delivered the Countess's “embittered grief,” Bruce Alexander's “admirable braggart Parolles” was not only “exactly costumed (his cross-hatched finery is precisely the âwindow of lattice' described by Lafew) but even in decline retains the clipped accents of the Sandhurst saloon-bar military poseur.”
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Peter Hall (1992)
Reviewing Peter Hall's production at The Swan in 1992, Michael Billington noted a particular problem with the play: “Shakespeare's psychological realism often bursts through the fairy tale structure.” He remarked that Hall, returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company after a twenty-year absence, had solved the difficulties “by giving the play the elegant formality of a spoken opera staged in Caroline costumes,” a device he considered “very much classical, late Peter Hall.”
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Martin Dodsworth in his review for the
Times Literary Supplement
found the production “intense and powerful”: “The bare stage of the Swan puts all the emphasis in how characters relate to one another. Body language throughout is significant. It rarely signifies happiness.”
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Helen (Sophie Thompson) entered “radiant with success” to dance with the cured King (Richard Johnson) in “a splendid scene.”
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When Bertram (Toby Stephens) rejected her, with an angry emphasis on “Disdain / Rather corrupt me ever!” (2.3.118â19), the court, as one, moved to protect the King. In this production, courtly
etiquette demanded that Bertram quickly repair the breach of decorum, accede to the King's command and exit holding Helen's hand.
Charles Spencer thought the production smacked of “dogged conscientiousness rather than real inspiration,” the Caroline costumes made the play “something of a museum piece,” and that “too few of the characters take on a life of their own.”
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While conceding the latter point, Dodsworth considered, “The price paid for coherence is a certain thinning-out of character” and “Helena is made to seem simpler than she is.” Hall's “through-line” for Helen was that of “a wide-eyed innocent”:
She is very close to a child and has the power to impose her childish conviction on others. When, at the end of it all, she has fulfilled the impossible conditions for her reunion with Bertram, she had the absolute faith of a child in the written word: “And look you, here's your letter. This it saysâ
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