Good For What Ails You
all’s well that ends well
the stratford festival
the national post
The comedy about the physician's daughter who cures the sick King of France and asks as reward the hand of a deeply unwilling young nobleman is part of Stratford history. It was one of the two plays presented at the first festival in 1953 and has been revived every time Stratford has hit a major anniversary. It is now the opening show of the 50th season.
That original Tyrone Guthrie staging -- a modern-dress fantasia - - put what was then a neglected play on the map -- not just for Stratford but for the world. Richard Monette's new production isn't up to that legendary standard, but it's the best account of the play that Stratford has seen since. In part it's a love letter to the Festival stage itself, here seen in its pristine state, steps and balcony intact and unadorned, and bathed at the outset in the familiar but still magical dappled light.
This sets the tone for what unfolds as a sober fairy tale. (The play's first line is about death.) The costumes, designed by Ann Curtis, are beautifully cut strict Jacobean; set decoration hardly goes beyond pennants at the French court and a few plants at the country seat of the Countess of Rossillion. Everything is concentrated on the actors and the text, who come together in some surprising ways.
The key scene here is the one in which Helena, our heroine, persuades the King, worn out by previous doctors, to give her medicine a try. It's written in rhyming couplets, which look on the page like pantomime jingle. Lucy Peacock and William Hutt (who have played these roles before, though in separate productions) find depth and human contact in their exchanges, and also an unforced sense of ritual. Music sounds, softly, as Helena, who seems to be a holistic practitioner, charms the King, hitherto resolutely chairbound, into getting up and walking to his cure.
Hutt plays the pre-miracle King in a piping, querulous murmur that occasions the odd worrying moment: Is it characterization or has the octogenarian actor's vocal range finally shrunk? He settles the matter when up and ruling; rebuking the ungracious Bertram, who can think of Helena only as the poor relation in his mother's house, this king sounds positively like Lear working up to the disinheriting of Cordelia. (Previously he may have reminded you of one of Hutt's other great roles, Moliere's Imaginary Invalid.) He husbands his passions -- Hutt has always been good at keeping his powder dry -- but he nonchalantly asserts his authority in the last scene by delivering several speeches with his back to us.
Peacock, who excels at playing the heroine-as-governess or vice versa, commands the play as this one. Helena is the rare female lead in a Shakespeare comedy who does not cloak her determination in humour; she is frequently on the verge of despair but always pulls herself out. Her marriage to Bertram comes half-way through the play. He immediately ducks off to the Italian wars; she pursues him and takes the place in bed of a Florentine girl he is trying to seduce. This traditional comic device may be hard to take, but the psychology behind it -- about the power of sexual fantasy -- is disturbingly acute. Helena herself has a few graphic lines about it. She is, you might say, old beyond her years -- a good thing to be in a play where the old people are, by and large, the good ones.
Bertram's mother, the Countess, who cherishes her daughter-in- law and despises her son, is finely played by Domini Blythe, especially beautiful when she's angry. Bernard Hopkins is a jovial master-of-ceremonies as the lord Lafew, and Benedict Campbell a gnarled presence as the Countess's family fool.
Bertram's cubbishness, which matures into caddishness, is unsparingly portrayed by David Snelgrove. Bertram is a perplexing character because he seems to have so much right on his side; why should he be married off as payment for the royal doctor's bill? Yet nearly everyone in the play condemns him, and by the end of the play -- after his behaviour in Italy, and his worse behaviour in France, where he tries to lie his way out of trouble -- we agree with them. (Sara Topham, as his Florentine prey, has an especially neat speech, dissecting him and men in general.)
We also have to believe that he is better off with Helena and (more of a stretch, but after all it's what she wants) she with him. The truth -- a harsh one, as comic truths tend to be -- is that she knows what's best for them both, and that all her tricks are justified. This physician gives tough medicine.
It could all be funnier. Bertram's immaturity and his twists and turns and wriggles under pressure have their farcical side; so his dependence on his braggart sidekick, Parolles, and his near- neurotic disgust when this self- proclaimed hero is revealed as a fraud.
Tim MacDonald's Parolles is initially tame, his swagger outshone by his multi-coloured shirt, which could be the original technicolour dreamcoat. He only comes into his own when exposed and reduced to zero. From here he rebuilds himself: "Simply the thing I shall make me live" is his new credo, and what he is is a beggar happy with a steady supply of crusts, glad of his rags.
We need more of this unapologetic humanity in the last scene, which here becomes a tidy disposition of loose ends rather than a balanced exhibition of human strength and folly. "All yet seems well," says the King, summing up, and some actors have emphasized that seems as if to cast serious doubts on the marital happiness of Helena and Bertram.
Realistically, those doubts are obviously justified, but this may not be the moment for realism. Hutt slides over the line; we are allowed a happy ending -- rightly, I think -- but it could come at more of a cost.
Still, the title tells us what really counts: After his moralizing wrap-up, the King has an epilogue on the standard pattern, politely requesting our applause. Hutt has always been good at epilogues, and this year, on this stage, it's wonderful that he should have the last word.