All's Well That Ends Well (25 page)

5.
Peter Hall's RSC production, 1992: the city wall and view of Florence with Andrée Evans as the Widow, “an example of how to play a small part to perfection,” Emily Raymond as Mariana, Sophie Thompson “a wide-eyed innocent” Helen, and Rebecca Saire as a “sparky” Diana.

Other performances drew praise; for example, Barbara Jefford's performance as the Countess was “full of poise and a sense of reflective wisdom, which is matched for weight by Richard Johnson's powerful King of France.”
¹¹⁹
Michael Siberry's “rollicking Parolles” possessed “the right energy and elan,”
¹²⁰
and Rebecca Saire's Diana was “sparky,”
¹²¹
while Andrée Evans as the Widow was commended as “an example of how to play a small part to perfection.”
¹²²

Hall kept some interesting surprises for the ending:

Finally there was the “beautiful moment” when the childlike Helen grows up:

Helen moved directly to the Countess, leaving Bertram free to choose. He held out his hand as she hoped he would.

Gregory Doran (2003)

Judi Dench played the Countess in Gregory Doran's production at the Swan (2003), returning to Stratford for the first time in twenty-four years. Michael Billington observed, “It is Dench who is drawing the crowds, but the triumph lies in the restoration of an unforgivably neglected play.”
¹²⁵

The set for the Rossillion estate had “an elegiac quality,” captured
in Stephen Brimson Lewis's “spare, effective design of wintry trees etched on sheets of silvery, scoured glass.”
¹²⁶
Costumes were seventeenth-century and Judi Dench was the “winter queen.”
¹²⁷
Kate Kellaway recalls the effect of Dench's performance:

A note of caution was sounded, however: “She gives an authoritative performance, as one would expect, but it is Helena and Bertram who matter,” and Bertram (Jamie Glover) “has no character change.”
¹²⁹
There was universal acclaim for Claudie Blakley's performance as Helen: “she's feisty and forlorn at the same time, vulnerable when riding high, courageous in deepest misery.”
¹³⁰
Nicholas de Jongh described how the Countess “scathingly dismisses her heir as a chronic disappointment and passionately upholds Helena as a cherishable daughter-in-law.”
¹³¹

The production had tilted approbation toward Helen in such a way that everything she did appeared “perfectly normal” while Bertram had nowhere to go at the end:

The play ended with the lights fading on Helen and Bertram “looking warily at one another, circling each other, a pace apart, in a recapitulation of the choosing scene's dance.”
¹³³

Turning to the rest of the cast, there was praise for “the wonderfully accomplished” performance of Gary Waldhorn as the King of France, while “Guy Henry as Parolles is bliss: tall as a hollyhock, trailing hippy scarves from unexpected quarters of his body and glitteringly garrulous. Thank goodness that the play, like life, is sorrow
and
joy.”
¹³⁴

Gregory Doran
, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. His much-acclaimed 2003 production of
All's Well That Ends Well
discussed here featured Dame Judi Dench as the Countess of Rossillion and Guy Henry as Parolles.

Stephen Fried
has a BA in history and drama from Stanford University and an MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama. He teaches acting at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and is on the directing faculty for the New School for Drama. He is the recipient of the Drama League Director's Fellowship as well as the Jacob Javitz Fellowship, and has trained at the Center for Theatre Studies in Gardzienice, Poland, and with the Double Edge Theatre troupe. He now works as a freelance director in New York after three years as resident assistant director with the Shakespeare Theatre Company.
Apart from his many innovative productions of the plays of Shakespeare and other classic writers, he has also created productions of new writing with contemporary playwrights. His successful
Much Ado About Nothing
in 2010 for the Trinity Shakespeare Festival led to his being hailed as a contemporary “Defining director.” Stephen is talking here about his 2010
All's Well That Ends Well
for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which successfully cast a total of nine actors for all twenty-three parts.

There are different views as to whether this is an early Shakespeare play (perhaps revised later) or a late play; did you have any preconceptions about this and were they confirmed or confounded by your production?

Doran:
I had a very precise impression of what period the play was, because it seemed to have a relationship with the Sonnets. There is something about the ambiguity of the language that reminded me in a very particular way of the Sonnets. Sometimes the language is dense and gnarled; there are times when Helen, in trying to describe her love for Bertram, describes it in a very compressed way. The Sonnets are all about compression; they keep feelings in check with language, whereas in
All's Well That Ends Well
feelings are released through language. That gave me a strong sense that the play would have been written around about the early 1600s. The Sonnets were first published in 1609 but clearly were written before that.

Fried:
Throughout my time working on
All's Well That Ends Well
, I never felt that it could have been an early play. My experience with the early comedies—having directed both
The Comedy of Errors
and
Love's Labour's Lost
—is that those plays radiate a youthful exuberance and naiveté. You feel in the early comedies that Shakespeare identifies himself principally with his youthful protagonists. In
All's Well That Ends Well
, he seems to take a much more critical look at the subject of youth—he points our attention in the play's first half not only to Bertram's pride and recklessness and Parolles' self-absorption, but also to Helen's inexperience and her mistaking of obsession for mature love. The adult characters—the Countess and
the King—function as the play's moral centers, and provide the play with its mature, almost Chekhovian outlook. Take, for example, the Countess's speech from Act 1 Scene 3:

I find it difficult to imagine that this could have been the work of a young writer. It's in passages like this one that Shakespeare seems to be identifying more with the older characters in the play, which isn't the case in the earlier plays.

In addition to this, the play's ambiguities, both in content and form, always suggested to me the work of a playwright who had grown so experienced in his craft that he was now experimenting with the comedic genre. In terms of content, the play's complicated moral questions regarding the possibility of redemption and the ability to love someone who may not deserve your love place it in close relation to the other mid-career problem plays
Troilus and Cressida
and
Measure for Measure
. In addition to this, the blending of comedic and dramatic tones seemed to me to connect
All's Well
with later plays—particularly
Cymbeline
—and so it never really seemed possible to me that this could be an early play.

The language of
All's Well That Ends Well
also distances it from the early-career works. In the early plays, Shakespeare frequently seems to be showing off through bold displays of his verbal dexterity. The language in those plays feels youthful and exuberant.
All's Well
, on the other hand, has a more mature, subtle, and complicated feeling to it. The imagery is more delicate and nuanced. To put it simply, the play sounds so different from the early comedies, and feels much more connected in tone to the great tragedies and problem plays that Shakespeare wrote in the middle and later phases of his career.

The play seems to draw attention to the role of language with its high incidence of rhyming couplets, of proverbs and sayings, on “telling” rather than “showing” and the inclusion of a character called Parolles; how did you cope with this emphasis on language in the play?

Doran:
The language in the central scene of the first part, when Helen cures the King, has an incantatory quality. In performance there is a sense that the rhymes themselves are curing the King. There is something very deliberate about the spell and the enchantment that it evokes.

Fried:
While there certainly are a great number of proverbs and rhymes in the play, in production and in terms of what the play is really about, I didn't find
All's Well That Ends Well
to be significantly more concerned with the role of language than any other of Shakespeare's plays. Human beings' relationship with language and words was a constant fascination of Shakespeare's, and appears as a theme in almost every play he wrote, probably most explicitly in
Love's Labour's Lost
.

That said, the play's emphasis on “telling” rather than “showing” is certainly one of the great challenges that it presents to a director. Many of the play's most significant events—Helen's curing of the King, her discovery that Bertram has run away, the complicated maneuvering of the rings, and of course the infamous “bed trick,” all occur offstage, and we're given complicated conversational scenes such as the beginning of Act 2 Scene 3 between Lafew, Bertram, and Parolles, or the opening of Act 4 Scene 3 between the two Dumaine brothers to learn of the momentous events that have taken place out of our view. As a result, I felt it was important at certain points to delicately weave visual storytelling into places where it wasn't explicitly called for by the playwright. An example of this was the ring plot—which is one of those aspects of the play that is endlessly talked about but barely shown onstage. I felt that the audience's appreciation for the significance of these rings would benefit from seeing a bit of their traffic, and so in the first scene, as the Countess bade farewell to Bertram, she presented his father's ring to him as a sort of “going away present.” In Act 2 Scene 3, the King
grandly presented his ring to Helen in gratitude for her curing him. These small moments enabled the audience to follow the conversation over these rings a little more closely in the final scene, I think.

Yet I also felt that the play's emphasis on telling rather than showing was somewhat by design, and I tried not to betray this aspect of the play. The result of this focus on the aftermath of an event, I found, is that the audience's attention is pulled off of the events themselves and onto the way that the play's characters respond to them. Thus, the real “story” of the play lies in the characters' subtle shifts in outlook and behavior as they react to what's happening around them. It's this aspect of the text that I think gives the play its almost Chekhovian tone; there is frequently a sensation of distance between the characters and the events they are responding to, and so the characters are able to reveal aspects of their humanity that they wouldn't if they were right in the middle of the event. For this reason, while we did show certain things when I felt that it might improve narrative clarity without betraying the play's structural intentions (such as the ring exchanges described above), I also tried to honor the play's impulse against showing certain events. I think many directors might be tempted to stage the bed trick in the interest of narrative clarity, but it felt intentional to me that the audience not be allowed to see that. As that moment of consummation represents such a major transformation for both Helen and Bertram, it seemed somehow perfect that Shakespeare leads us right up to that scene, then suddenly takes the characters away to somewhere where we can't see exactly what they go through—where a miracle can occur—and then brings them back radically changed. Both Helen and Bertram's speech and behavior change fundamentally from Act 4 Scene 3 on—after the point in the play where the bed trick would occur. So we come to understand what has happened not by seeing the event itself, but by seeing how it has changed the human beings that were involved in it. By keeping the bed trick offstage, Shakespeare allows the event to assume a more mythic size than anything that could be shown onstage.