All’s Well That Ends Well
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Sometimes, all's well that begins well. Fifty-five years ago the Stratford Festival got off to a terrific start by mounting what was then the most neglected of Shakespeare's so-called "dark comedies" and, in effect, reclaiming it for the repertoire. Tyrone Guthrie gave his production of All's Well That Ends Well an Edwardian-cum-Chekhovian setting, a choice repeated some 30 years later in a Trevor Nunn staging that went from Britain to Broadway. Now the play is back on the Festival stage, directed by Marti Maraden, whose program note opts unequivocally for a costume date of 1889 and whose production is redolent, like Nunn's, of autumn and railway stations.

It doesn't have the sophistication of Nunn's version, despite Christina Poddubiuk's sets and frocks. It's a decent production but it's soft at its centre. All's Well is about tough love. Helena, orphaned daughter of a doctor, falls in love with Bertram, the Count of Rossillion, in whose widowed mother's house she has grown up. She promises to cure the King of France of a fistula if he'll reward her with a husband of her choice. She does and he does.

She picks Bertram, who isn't pleased at being summarily married off. He runs off to the Florentine wars and sets about seducing a virtuous young maiden of the parish. Helena takes the girl's place in bed, gets pregnant and, after exposing him at court, gets her man. We have to be persuaded that this is all for the best.

For this to happen, we need a Helena not afraid to show that, though her ends may be admirable, her means are ruthless, and a desperately callow Bertram in urgent need of salvation from himself. Daniela Vlaskalic's Helena is a girl scout, all light, no shade; Jeff Lillico's Bertram faithfully says and does all the things that are set down for him, but without any sign of passion or purgation. To be fair, the only good Bertram I've seen was the late Ian Richardson; he was able to draw a high-comedy line around the character, highlighting his insecurities and earning forgiveness for them. Leah Oster, so good in The Music Man, plays the almost-abandoned Diana, who is supposed to drive the revelations of the last scene, a task for which she lacks both the vivacity and the classical chops.

It's strange that the production should miss out on the sadness that dogs the play's centre, since it's so insistent on the melancholy that haunts its edges. Its presiding presence is Tom Rooney, as the Countess's clown Lavache. He gets all the laughs his author allows and a few over. Martha Henry plays his employer, beautifully, as strong of mind but frail of body; she visibly ages in the absence of her son and adopted daughter.

The king is Brian Dennehy, quiet but with authority to burn, and as the Lord Lafew Stephen Ouimette is a jewel, able to bring down the house with a flicked-off line like "Who's his tailor?" The object of the inquiry is Juan Chioran's towering Parolles, braggart soldier and Bertram's hanger-on, who looks to be on permanent furlough from the French Foreign Legion. The extended sequence of his unmasking by his fellow officers, who fool him into thinking he's been captured by the enemy, is a joy. It's also an awesome demonstration of company strength, what with Ben Carlson and Patrick McManus as the commentating brothers Dumaine (Carlson especially good as sardonic philosopher) and Randy Hughson a gleeful interrogator and double-talk specialist. It's all a bit detached, though, with Parolles not really feeding into the play's general examination of human frailty or establishing his status as Bertram's evil angel; though of course, with Chioran being approximately twice Lillico's height, it must be hard for them to make eye (or any other kind of) contact. But this is the production's besetting fault; it's crowded with talent (it has Fiona Reid in the small role of the Widow and Michelle Fisk in the tiny one of Mariana) but it feels underpopulated. It can't be a coincidence that this season's version of the open stage, stripped of familiar balcony and columns, has played host to inaudibility in every single show.