All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 86) - Peter Marks (review date 6 November 2003)
Peter Marks (review date 6 November 2003)
SOURCE: Marks, Peter. Review of All's Well That Ends Well. Washington Post (6 November 2003): C4.
[In the following review of director Richard Clifford's 2003 staging of All's Well That Ends Well at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., Marks finds the production conventional, drab, and lifeless.]
Even on the most accommodating of slopes, All's Well That Ends Well would be rough sledding. Perverse is not too strong a term for the vein in which Shakespeare is working in this peculiar “comedy” about a woman creepily pursuing a snooty punk of a nobleman who can barely stand the sight of her.
Over the years, literary critics have taken up the cause of this rarely performed piece as a small, misunderstood gem. George Bernard Shaw thought its spirited heroine, Helena, was a prototype for Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House, and other analysts have obsessively puzzled...
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