Nunn's All's Well

All’s Well That Ends Well
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

For Trevor Nunn’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well (Stratford), John Gunter has designed a set unflurriedly versatile and full of quiet, stately magic. Composed of glass and wrought-iron, it strongly suggests Marylebone Station; and the play has been given an Edwardian treatment, in which trains are never far off. 

We begin with our hero and heroine, Bertram and Helena, dancing in silhouette: I suppose, a hesitation waltz. The lights go up and we are in the conservatory of the Countess of Rossillion, Bertram’s mother. He is off to the French court and is already chafing impatiently by the door; Helena — his mother’s ward, a physician’s daughter—he hardly notices. A trio of maids wave the young master a tearful goodbye. (They are fixtures; and are deliciously ushered off the stage in the last scene when the stream of revelations become altogether too domestic for domestics.)

A sweep of curtains takes us to court which is Ruritanian and also given to dancing; having cured the king of a fistula, Helena chooses herself a promised husband in a game of Musical Suitors. When Bertram, her unwilling selection, flies from her to the Florentine wars, he comes to a landscape of smokey bivouacs and louche cafes. Recruits arrive in a city whose communications—symbolised by a battered rail-sign marked ‘Fireze’—are clearly taking the strain. There seems, by the way, to be a direct line to Rossillion.  The Countess seems actually to live by the track; rising smoke without lends the scene a Chekhovian enchantment, but must have been terrible for property values. 

Visually this is Mr. Nunn’s most sophisticated production to date; it has the outward semblance of a masterpiece. Its innards are moving in that direction, but still have some way to go; last week several performances seemed muffled. 

At the end Helena and Bertram are dancing again, still with a question-mark in their step. But the last scene had lacked authority; an attempt to build up Helena’s return to the level of Hermione’s resurrection in The Winter’s Tale worked only superficially, since the audience never believes that Helena is dead. 

Mike Gwilym offers an unsparingly puppyish Bertram, matched by a Helena from Harriet Walter of unswerving quiet practicality. Miss Walter is very good at heartbreak; the finest moment is her offer, realising that Bertram does not love her, to forgo the marriage. Only the King pushed it through. Helena's imperative becomes not to get a man, but to get his love. This she achieves by the traditional trick of substituting herself in another girl’s bed. But the bed-trick is not just a plot mechanism; it’s sexually acute. ‘Lust doth play with what it loathes for that which is away.’ Thinking Helena to be Diana, Bertram loves her; to each his own fantasy. 

The play is full of sharp corners. Its nicest characters are its oldest; they all lament the passing of better days, so constantly that what might be passing nostalgia builds up to a meditation on the cruelty of time. Peggy Ashcroft gives a lovely performance of the Countess, radiating generosity from the sidelines, but unable actually to do anything. She suspects that her son keeps bad company; this Bertram has a Jeeves, the braggart soldier Parolles, eventually subjected to an unmasking more brutal than Malvolio’s, and funnier. 

Bertram’s rejection of him is, in this production, very like Hal’s and Falstaff. But, unlike Falstaff, Parolles survives; his ensuing scenes of calculated self-abasement are like nothing else in Shakespeare, and Stephen Moore, only moderately hilarious as the peacocking Parolles, is terrific in his downfall. He parallels Helena, since both have a way to make, both depend on the same benefactor, both make things happen. This, though, is not Miss Walter’s forte; hence, in part, the lag at the end. 

The show is still full of marvellous detail: the conspirators’ interplay in the baiting of Parolles; the silky inflections of Robert Eddison’s Lafeu; Guy Woolfenden’s unfailingly seductive piano music; Julia Swift’s Mariana, camp follower turned broken blossom; Geoffrey Hutchings's hunchbacked clown, shuffling off the stage as the last waltz begins. Once I would have ended by looking forward to its arrival at the Aldwych. Now, remembering the play’s doubts about progress, I cross my fingers for the Barbicon.