Mr Tyrone Guthrie's Stratford production of All's Well That Ends Well is about as perfect as we are likely to see. At first this seems improbable: Mr Guthrie staged it in Edwardian dress, and in principle the shades of My Fair Lady have little to do with the most serious of Shakespeare's early comedies. The poor bard, I thought, is going to be sacrificed once again to the Bright Idea. But not at all. The play translates perfectly: Shakespeare's courtliness becomes boiled-shirt formality; the renaissance men of honour are 'gentlemen', those without it cads; even the religious overtones come easily, thanks to Mr Guthrie's and his cast's extraordinary control over the tone; and the military horseplay becomes, almost incredibly, funny. Mr Guthrie, in fact, has had two bright ideas: the second is to turn the lumbering comedy of the war in Florence into a kind of Edwardian Army Game. The officers drink their light ale and are bored; the other ranks slouch around, scratch themselves and get at their superiors. At first the producer seems deliberately to be overdoing it, yet, by some miracle Elizabethan braggadocio becomes common or garden bull, and the jokes, for perhaps the first time since Shakespeare's day, are jokes. Every other detail of the production is worked out with the same care and invention. Helena chooses her husband in a beautifully elegant dance, the court orchestra tinkling in the background. She travels panoplied in veils and surrounded by wicker baskets through melancholy Edwardian stations. The reconciliation scene moves effortlessly from near-farce to the deepest seriousness. Mr Guthrie's invention is infinite. But, unlike Mr Richardson's in Othello, it is all at the service of the play. And it is matched at every point by Miss Tanya Moiseiwitsch's sets.

It is also matched by some superlative acting. Regretfully, I can only pick out the best of a remarkable bunch. Dame Edith Evans had not only all the dignity and wonderful range of expression you expect of her, she also resisted nobly the temptation to act everyone else off the stage, though the amount she made of the rather unpromising part was in its way a miracle. Mr Cyril Luckham played Parolles with full Terry-Thomas vulgarity, yet deepened the role, after his unmasking, into a kind of proto-Falstaff. Robert Hardy, as the King, balanced strength with pettishness, bottom-slapping with command. Priscilla Morgan turned Diana into a full-scale comic creation, not so virtuous perhaps as Shakespeare intended, but warmer and splendidly vulnerable. Angela Baddeley, as her trinketed old mum, was too fidgety at first, but her final hobble across the stage, as she collected her scattered dignity about her, was a minor triumph. The major triumph, however, was Miss Zoe Caldwell. It has become so much the fashion to speak Shakespeare as though his poetry were something extraneous to the play, merely unnecessary ornament, that Miss Caldwell's performance was doubly remarkable. She can speak verse not only as though she both means and understands it, but in such a way that it seems perfectly to express all the subtlety, flow and depth of her feelings. Perhaps her intensity made her wail too much at the beginning, but by the end she had transformed Helena, against all the odds, into one of the most moving of Shakespeare's heroines. On this showing she has the emotional range and intelligence to make her the finest Shakespearean actress of her generation.