The Winter’s Tale, All’s Well That Ends Well
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Three transfers from Stratford to the Barbican. The Winter’s Tale got under my guard last year. The first half was plain but intelligible, the second pepped up by Stephen Oliver’s tunes—classy Victorian pop. The assorted swains and wenches at the Bohemian sheep-staring seems to enjoy dancing to them, and certainly Geoffrey Hutchings’s cockney Autolycus enjoyed singing them. 

Last week at the Barbican Mr. Hutchings was acting his socks off, but his heart seemed to have gone out of the job. It is not too easy to evoke bucolic revelry, or come to that bucolic melancholy, on the bare platform—alternately draped or polished—that is all this production has for a set. 

Nor is it very kind to scenes of jealousy back in Sicilia. (Only a matter of time before someone tries a Mafia setting.) Patrick Stewart as Leontes goes though the motions well enough, but there is no sense of his behaviour having thrown his entire out into disarray; not much court, indeed, for him to throw. The actors look isolated, and any effects they bring off they have to manage on their own. Gemma Jones does it briefly in Hermione’s trial-scene; Julia Hills as Perdita has some moments, notably her versified seed-catalogue, that suggest a lyrical actress in the making. For the rest, one hardly knows whether the performances are failing to catch fire because of the staging, or vice versa. 

The director, Ronald Eyre, takes the play strictly as a comedy, a form dedicated to undermining dignity. At the height of Leontes’s transports, his rejected baby cries, causing embarrassment all round; he has outraged nature, and this is nature’s revenge. This kind of thing always seems to be happening to him. Antigonus (Robert Eddison, wry and resonant) is henpecked and knows it; his wife (Sheila Hancock) well known as the court scold. Her abrupt re-marriage at the end gets another laugh, but I can’t see the play needs it anymore than it gains from having young lover Florizel played aggressively gauche. In a richer production, laughter enhances the pattern; here it makes the play seem shallow. 

Trevor Nunn’s Chekhovian production of All’s Well That Ends Well, by contrast, is crammed with visual detail. No, not crammed; everything here is carefully measured, beautifully disposed. Last year I failed to mention the King of France’s red smoking-jacket, the green lampshades that adorn the matching baize tables of his salon, the march-past of the Florentine army, who weave in a series of semi-circles as the spectators change position, the momentary impersonation by one of the Countess’s three maids of her humpbacked clown. And who can forget the last waltz as Helena and Bertram are ill-matched. That has been the ground of critical dissatisfaction with the play for centuries. Why spend five acts bringing them together? Mr. Nunn leaves you wondering. To rationalise my lingering dissatisfaction I must resort to comparison. In 1967 there was an RSC production by John Barton adorned by a dozen fine and forthright performances, crowned by Ian Richardson’s Bertram, a searching high-comic portrayal (by an actor slightly too old, which helped) of a desperately insecure young man needing to be saved from himself. 

The salvation was, as comedy tends to be, a rough, loving process. But the purgation worked; at the end he and Helena had some chance, the play some point. The choric comments of Brewster Mason’s Lafeu, disgusted (‘I will buy a son-in-law at a fair’) or reconciled (‘mine eyes smell onions’), effortlessly brought the house down, teaching me more about classic comedy than any production I have witnessed. It’s a hard discipline; Mr. Nunn’s melancholy (yes, I confess, magical, magical) is easy by comparison. 

This has partly to do with lightweight acting: Harriet Walter’s tearful, determined Helena (has an actress ever been so autumnal so young?) is fine for the first part of the play, under strength for the second; Philip Franks’s Bertram intelligent but blank; Cheryl Campbell’s Diana over-eager in her management of the last scene. Interest shifts from youth to age, where the characters are well-meaning but powerless. ‘To be young again if we could’ becomes the key-line, matchlessly delivered by Peggy Ashcroft’s Countess. This is being widely described as Mr. Nunn’s best production. In terms of mise-en-scène maybe it is; of performance, hardly.