All's Well That Ends Well (22 page)

Charles Kemble mounted a spectacular production in 1811 at Covent Garden, using his brother's text, which received good reviews but, despite this and an excellent cast, it was revived for only one further performance. Kemble's script had emphasized the play's romantic
elements; the next adaptation, Frederick Reynolds's operatic version for Covent Garden in 1832, attempted to excise those aspects of the play considered tasteless and to replace them with musical extracts from more popular Shakespeare plays such as
A Midsummer Night's Dream
and
Twelfth Night
, but to little avail as both public and critics still found the play unacceptable.

Samuel Phelps played Parolles himself in his 1852 Sadler's Wells production to general acclaim, despite continued critical carping about the “rude nature of its plot” and “exceedingly gross” manners.
²⁵
Henry Irving's amateur production at St. George's Hall in 1895 likewise failed to please, despite his efforts to render the play fit for Victorian audiences by extensive cuts: “The text had been so carefully bowdlerised for the Irving Club that the story would scarcely have been comprehensible to any one who did not know it beforehand.”
²⁶
George Bernard Shaw, similarly exercised about the textual cuts, was equally scathing about the leading performances:

The actor-manager Frank Benson finally produced
All's Well
for the Shakespeare Theatre in 1916—after thirty-five years this and
Titus Andronicus
were the only two plays which had never been produced at Stratford. Benson himself played Parolles with his wife as Helen but the production was overshadowed by the celebrations of his recent knighthood:

Theater historian Joseph G. Price argues that productions of the play underwent a fundamental transformation in the twentieth century with the advent of the director, anxious to impose a coherent interpretation on the play as a whole: “The stage history of
All's Well
in the twentieth century is, with a few exceptions, a record of attempts of directors to thread the brilliant parts with a unifying, appealing theme.”
²⁹
The problem was that “theatrical tradition offered only remnants as guides, and scholarly analysis had failed to fashion a coherent pattern. The threading was difficult, and early experiments did little to change the general distaste for the play.”
³⁰

William Poel's 1920 production at the Ethical Church, Bayswater, was certainly driven by a strong directorial line. Poel had founded the Elizabethan Stage Society which attempted to reproduce original stagings as far as possible for the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In
All's Well
though he saw a play with a contemporary social message:

However, Poel's decision to emphasize the play's serious elements and to use low lighting gave the production a somber tone that prompted the critic of the
Athenaeum
to comment that “Helena has her counterpart in Hamlet.”
³²

Robert Atkins's production for the Old Vic in 1921 was judged “both interesting and disappointing.”
³³
The set and lighting were praised but something was missing: “It is passionate power that Mr. Atkins fails habitually to get from his actors; he has, too, a sort of statuesque convention which he imposes on every play, as though
Shakespeare could be played in talking tableaux.”
³⁴
The pace of the production dragged; Jane Bacon's Helen was too solemn and the comedy was underplayed: “Parolles discussing virginity with Helena, for example … Mr Ernest Milton got through this scene without once provoking a laugh; he played it like someone skating on very thin ice, as though he were trying to spare Helena's blushes instead of provoking them.”
³⁵

Tastes were changing slowly, and the second Stratford production directed by William Bridges-Adams in 1922 proved no more successful than the first. Birmingham Repertory Theatre staged the first modern-dress production in 1927 with “the Countess swathed in the crêpe so loved by Gallic widows, and Helena beside her in the simplest of dresses to show a dependant's humility.”
³⁶
Bernard Shaw noted the “buoyant sense of humour” of Parolles, described by the critic J. C. Trewin as “an amiable, too smart young man, a
sommelier
's scourge,” played by “a youth of nineteen, virile, heavy-eyebrowed, darkly handsome … His name was Laurence Olivier.”
³⁷

In 1935 Ben Iden Payne directed the third Stratford production which again failed to please. Robert Atkins was fortunate that in 1940 at the time of his third production it was the only play in London's war-torn West End. Audience and critics were duly grateful but not bowled over. Catherine Lacey, who had played the Countess in the previous Stratford production, now played Helen to general acclaim, as “a creature from a fantastic story-book. You need not believe in her, but love her you must—and love her you will.”
³⁸
Doubts were still expressed about the play itself though: “The plot proves untrue to the title by going from bad to worse; but the poetry, intermittently, goes from good to better.”
³⁹
Needless to say, this view did not go unchallenged: “Mr. Robert Atkins should be praised and encouraged for his direction. But the play may now be put by for another twenty years without great loss. Anybody heard defending its poetry should be asked point-blank to quote two consecutive lines.”
⁴⁰

It was Tyrone Guthrie in 1953 at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, who finally succeeded in capturing the play's divergent elements to create a coherent whole and establish its place in the modern repertoire:

Guthrie recognized its essential modernity and saw how he might translate this insight to the stage: “Helena might be the heroine of an Existentialist drama. She refuses to be passive; she will not resign herself to be what Simone de Beauvoir, in
The Second Sex
, calls ‘the prisoner of immanence.' She takes a firm line with her fate.”
⁴²
The production's modern dress “did a great deal to explain Helena to the audience.”
⁴³
Joseph G. Price expands on the point:

Its staging suggests another “modern” aspect of the production. As film has largely superseded the theater in presenting “realism,” theater has returned to its roots, capitalizing on the immediacy of the actors' presence to the audience. The aim of the set designer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, was “to offer the facilities of an Elizabethan stage, but not to attempt an Elizabethan pseudo-antique style.”
⁴⁵
All the performances were praised, but Irene Worth's Helen was singled out:

In the same year the Old Vic mounted a less successful production directed by Michael Benthall, who was accused by one critic of turning the play into “a cross between rollicking pantomime and fairytale.”
⁴⁷
Benthall, who had set himself the task of performing all of Shakespeare's plays in his five-year tenure at the Old Vic, did not much care for the play, and in order to make it palatable for modern audiences, aimed “to remove some of the bitter taste from the play and to give it instead a fairy-tale unreality.”
⁴⁸
With this end in mind, he invited Osbert Lancaster (best known as a cartoonist) to design costumes and sets: “The backdrops, clear and bright like cut-outs from a child's picture book, and the fresh colours of the costumes, admirably succeeded in creating a fairy-tale atmosphere.”
⁴⁹
The undoubted prettiness was unconvincing though:

The honors, such as they were, went to “Mr. Michael Hordern's horribly real and truly pointed performance as the boastful cowardly militarist, Parolles, and Miss Fay Compton's Countess of Roussillon.”
⁵¹

Two years later in 1955 Noel Willman directed the play at Stratford “as a dark comedy,” but

Joyce Redman's Helen “dominated the stage, not with her vivacity, nor indeed emotional variety, but by a moral earnestness which
prompted frequent appeals to heaven … she behaved ‘like some ghastly Shavian woman … [demonstrating] a pertinacity worthy of the North-West Mounted Police.' ”
⁵³
The lightweight Bertram “could not be taken seriously as a partner in the ‘dark comedy' ” and the “sinister potentialities of Parolles were ignored as well.”
⁵⁴

In 1959 Tyrone Guthrie's successful Canadian production was revived at the Stratford Memorial Theatre with Zoe Caldwell as Helen, Robert Hardy as the King, and Dame Edith Evans as the Countess. The majority of critics were enthusiastic, concurring with the judgment of the
Times
's critic:

A. Alvarez thought that “Mr Tyrone Guthrie's Stratford production of
All's Well That Ends Well
is about as perfect as we are likely to see.”
⁵⁶
One piece of business noted by many was Helen's curing of the King:

There were dissenters. The critic of the
New York Times
argued that “it is apparent that Mr. Guthrie's intentions are frivolous rather than serious, and that his aim is less to reveal hidden depths in this play than to extract all possible fun.”
⁵⁸
While Muriel St. Clare Byrne declared Edith Evans's performance “flawless,”
⁵⁹
Alan Brien characterized it thus: “Edith Evans is Edith Evans—an exiled queen locked away in a madhouse who still bestows her autumnal wisdom on the deaf zanies around her,” concluding that “the play itself remains a ragbag of revue sketches.”
⁶⁰
Nevertheless, Guthrie's is generally regarded as the watershed production for
All's Well
, demonstrating that the play was now acceptable and could be made to work for wider audiences.