Read All's Well That Ends Well Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
All's Well That Ends Well (23 page)
1.
Tyrone Guthrie's “watershed” production of 1959 with Zoe Caldwell as Helen and Robert Hardy as the King: “Miss Caldwell makes a quick and unexpected move, stands behind the King's chair, and places her hands upon his browâ
â¦â
It is quite breath-taking, and completely right, startling and convincing us simultaneously.”
The stage history of the play in America is “astonishingly brief.”
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There was a production in 1799 at the Federal Street Theatre, Boston, in which Elizabeth Kemble-Whitlock (a sister of the Kembles) played Helen, although no reviews of the production have survived. In the nineteenth century Augustin Daly seems to have been interested in putting it on and commissioned an acting text from William Winter, but in the event he never staged it. Guthrie's was thus the first significant North American production. Price does, however, mention the “amusing fact” of its “popularity as a burlesque in American vaudeville.”
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In 1959, the same year as the revival of Guthrie's production, John Houseman directed the play for the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut. Whereas Guthrie had emphasized its comic elements, Houseman produced a dark tragicomedy: “Surprisingly, the reception by critics and audiences was almost as enthusiastic as that won by the Guthrie revival.”
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Nancy Wickwire as Helen “played the heroine with intensity,” making her “the centre of the play to the exclusion of all other characters”:
The force of her character assumed a tragic intensity with Bertram's rejection of her. Her horror at the thought that she was responsible for Bertram's flight to war and at the potential danger that was threatened to him suggested that the “dark comedy” was in fact a very dark tragedy.
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The character of Bertram, meanwhile, was softened with stage business such as a kiss and wave to Helen in the first scene:
This kind of stage business was even more effective after the marriage when Bertram sent his bride back to Rousillon. He was not unkind to her. Somewhat overwhelmed by the force of her passion, he turned to say something to her, some kind word, but she had already begun her exit. He checked himself, showed dismay at hurting her, then recovered quickly and shouted his youthful boast.
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Price concluded, however, that Houseman had
paid a heavy price for his tragi-comedy. The infusion of passion changed Parolles from a braggart soldier to a coward-villain who failed to draw his first real laugh from the audience until his capture. Even then, the turnabout of his exposure was pathetic as he was knocked about by each of the departing lords in what became a repugnant scene.
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Nevertheless, the production was a popular success and the majority of critics agreed with Henry Hewes of the
Saturday Review
that “Houseman had âmade this unpopular play work by filling it with genuine passion.'â
”
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Since then the play has been revived at regular intervals and become, if not popular, at least a standard part of the Shakespearean repertoire. The five notable RSC productions at Stratford are discussed in more detail below.
Elijah Moshinsky's 1980 BBC television production was widely praised for the way it transferred the play to the small screen: “it seems to accept the inevitable diminution in theatrical power that the translation involves, and tries to invent new relationships which will (to some degree) compensate for that loss.”
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Jeremy Treglown describes how
Moshinsky has framed the scenes as a series of calm seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, using mirrors to give depth to his surface and filling the small screen with the interplay of grouping and of light and shade, rather than with elaborate action or tricky camerawork. It works beautifully and gives a
rich visual context to the unexpectedly plausible action itself, from Helena's falling (on the rebound from her father's death) for her shifty childhood friend Bertram, to his miserably trapped duplicities in the arranged marriage which follows.
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Angela Down's “serenely unstoppable” Helen was praised, as was Ian Charleson's “sulkily handsome” Bertram, with Celia Johnson as his “understandably anxious old mother” and Michael Hordern as the “melancholy-wise, genial old Lafeu.”
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Donald Sinden's rather “fruity” representation of the King caused several critics concern: “one of the lapses in a usually cool and contained production.”
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The production's successful translation to television was nowhere more apparent than the televisual technique employed to handle the final reveal as Diana is being taken to prison, as described by G. K. Hunter:
At the door she stops and pleads her final stay of execution: “Good mother, fetch my bail.” As the cast looks through the door music begins to play. “Behold the meaning,” says Diana. But the camera does not allow us to behold. Instead it does what the camera does bestâit shows us a set of mouths and eyes. As it tracks along the line we are made witness to a series of inner sunrises, as face after face responds to the miracle and lights up with understanding and relief. I confess to finding it a very moving experience.
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In 1993 Richard Jones directed a “mesmerizing”
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production of the play for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park, in a style “more akin” to “tragicomedy.”
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The set design was essentially abstract:
On a sea-green backing, marked by an aqua blue strip, hangs a white Rothko-like panel with a Donald Judd-like sculpture in the center that doubles as a mirror. When the action moves to Italy, the panel divides to reveal a lovely Tuscan countryside, decked with burnt umber fields and a tiny medieval townâ
â¦â
Washed by Mimi Jordan Sherin's sea-change lighting, the visual impact is ravishing.
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The production was literally stalked by a death's head, “a little boy in a Halloween skeleton costume. Sometimes he slips, unnoticed, scythe in hand, into courtly processions at Rousillon and Paris; sometimes he peers down at the action from a perch in a row of spectators above and behind the railings.”
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The acting was strong, with “standout performances” by Miriam Healy-Louie as Helen and Joan Macintosh as the Countess; however, “The only genuine comedy [was] provided by the chorusâcourtiers drilled within an inch of their livesâwhether simultaneously lighting clay pipes during the interrogation scene or returning from Italy with identical suit-cases.”
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Matthew Lloyd's 1996 production at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre was set in “a stiff and chilly version of the 1930sâ
â¦â
holding throughout to the sombre economies implied by the allblack costumes of its opening stage-direction.”
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This theme was reflected in the “unwelcoming set, the floor an expanse of dark, glassy marble fractured by numerous cracks” and the lack of “emotional warmth” with the cast deployed in “stiffly stylised groupings” displayed in “cool isolation.”
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The production's “saving grace” was Alastair Galbraith's Parolles, “blessedly exempt from the icy self-control exuded by the rest of the cast.”
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Very different was Irina Brook's production for the Oxford Playhouse in 1997, which “attempted to create a world in which the folk-story origins of the play might operate freely by presenting it in a pastiche African world.”
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The production revealed that “the play's theatrical energy is more or less indestructible if the role that drives it has been adequately cast.”
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In this case Rachel Pickup's Helen was “so full of energy, so gracefully and intelligently spoken, and so committed in her love for Emil Marwa's boyishly naive Bertram, that much of this wonderful play's essence seemed to survive the mistaken directorial concept.”
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Two recent productions have enjoyed critical and popular success; Marianne Elliott's in 2009 for the National Theatre and Stephen Fried's 2010 production for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Elliott offered a “picture-book romance” that evolved into a story about “the attainment of maturity.”
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In critic Michael
Billington's view its strength was the way in which the production balanced “romance and realism,” with Michelle Terry's “fine performance” as Helen “holding the evening together”: “We see her growth from fairy princess into real woman. And even though hero and heroine are finally united, there is a look of aghast bewilderment as they pose for the cameras. In short Elliott gives us a fairytale for grown-ups.”
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Stephen Fried's inspired decision to set the play in the Edwardian period of the “New Woman” enabled beautiful, flowing art nouveau sets and elegant costumes, while making Ellen Adair's combination of “girlish modesty with the passion and wiles of a determined go-getter”
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seem plausible. The versatile cast of nine played all twenty-three parts in this lively, warmly received production, with some notable doubling by John Ahlin as the King of France and the Clown Lavatch, and Tamara Tunie, the Countess and Widow Capilet. The three actors who played single roles were Adair as “an engagingly outgoing and energetically upbeat”
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Helen; Clifton Duncan softening the unlovable Bertram by making him appear “blandly clueless”;
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and Clark Carmichael playing Parolles with “dandified comic flairâ
â¦â
Ostentatiously grooming his mustache and eyebrows while peering into a hand-held mirror, he is the ultimate braggart and prevaricator, itching for a comeuppance.”
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The conclusion of the
New York Times
's review seems to sum up the theatrical fate of the play: “Though you leave the theater wondering about the long-term viability of Helena and Bertram's union, you hope for the best. In the meantime, you can't help loving this show.”
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The play's historical unpopularity and paucity of performances over the years has offered modern directors a particular sort of challenge:
All's Well That Ends Well
is for us virtually a new play, and in this it is not unlike another problem comedy that has only recently found an audience,
Troilus and Cressida
. The “indelicacy”
of the central story, in which a woman pursues a man all the way into his bed, has ensured that the play has no theatrical history worth mentioning until a few years ago.
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John Barton (1967)
John Barton's production with Estelle Kohler as Helen (Lynn Farleigh took over the role the following year) to Ian Richardson's Bertram offers a striking set of ambiguities. From the start, Kohler presents a bright, witty young woman, sincere in her devotion to Bertram, while Richardson, stunned by her effrontery, recoils in anger at the “betrothal” and storms, “I cannot
love
her.” The critic of the
Birmingham Mail
acknowledged the dilemma for an audience faced with a likable Helen and a justifiably angry Bertram:
She does the early debate with Parolles on virginity with wit, and for the rest of the evening she has so completely won our sympathies as a young woman in love with her social superior that I doubt whether we give much thought to the lack of scruple in her tactics. It is much to Ian Richardson's credit, in the face of this attack, that he can make Bertram's resentment and defiance reasonably understandable.
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The theater program suggests that Bertram's conduct “has recently been viewed with less repulsion. It is realised that his attitude to a match with a poor girl below his rank would have seemed normal and not snobbish in Shakespeare's time.” Accordingly, taking its cue from Stuart Hall's discussion in the theater program of a struggle in the play between the old order, represented by the King, Lafew, and the Countess, and a counterculture where “the young make up the rules,” the play could be appraised as “an unromantic analysis of sex and station in life”: “In John Barton's splendidly simple production the modernity of the play is appreciated.”
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Timothy O'Brien's simple wooden set, together with the Jacobean costumes, emphasized the historical and cultural contexts against which the sexual politics were played out.
A change in critical perceptions of Helen is evident from remarks by the critic J. C. Trewin:
Estelle Kohler does very little indeed that could win me to Helena but Bertram is transformed by one of the finest Royal Shakespeare actors, Ian Richardson: making no excuses for the man's weakness and arrogance, he does get us to listen.
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