At Stratford-upon-Avon this week there was a revival of a quaint old piece called All's Well That Ends Well. It was knocked together some 350 years ago by a hack actor who never even became a knight. Indeed, I'm told he could hardly write his own name. Most of my readers, fortunately for them, will be familiar with his work only as improved upon by some of those myriad-minded directors who are the glory of this present age. There was a time when men of the theatre who were bored with his long speeches, bemused by his involved language, irritated by his dragging plots, outraged by his reactionary views, rocked to sleep by his whiskery jokes, would rewrite a play of his-and proudly put their own name on the title page. But life today is too short to do a Dryden on such badly proof-read texts. Instead we have Mr. Tyrone Guthrie, himself the author of such masterpieces as Kiss Me Cressida, Pullup for Carmen, A Touch of Larry in the Night and The Three Wee Estates (this last in Serbo-Croat). Anybody who has missed All's Well because he thought it would be Shakespearean can happily begin to queue immediately. Mr. Guthrie has miraculously rejigged this old-fashioned prodigy of tedium into a rollicking farce which must instantly appeal to all fans of the Crazy Gang, all connoisseurs of ENSA concert parties, all aficionados of the Army Game: in short, all those who believe that the British theatre has been too long dominated by mere word-spinners and is sadly in need of a few grotesques who know how to parrot a comic accent, execute a lively prat-fall, and bump into each other every time they limp across the stage.

Mr. Guthrie begins by setting the play in another age from the original—or rather several other ages. The court of the King of France becomes the Kaiser's Germany. The Tuscan battlefield outside the walls of Florence is transformed into the Western Desert of 1941. The French nobles are all spruced and frogged and helmeted like Ouida guardsmen. Parolles is a 1930 sportscar cad with a thin moustache, light brown shoes, a yellow muffler and a trilby hat (though later he affects the orange tights and gold braid of an Ivor Novello aide-de-camp). Mr. Guthrie has understood the basic law of show business—keep 'em guessing. It doesn't matter what you do as long as it is different from what you did for. He takes the same freedom with the characters as he does with the settings. Diana is described in the text—even in Mr. Guthrie's text—as 'a young gentlewoman of most chaste renown' Therefore she must be played as a wartime factory tart who sits on the doorstep in nightgown and housecoat, with a turban on her head and a lollipop in her mouth, giggling the lines in coffee-bar Cockney. Her mother is an old bag of tricks from a Giles cartoon swathed in a purple knitted dress, strangled in Woolworth beads, and choking over her nightcap of gin. As much as possible of the evening—which lasts three and a half hours—must be taken up with elaborate, wordless business. The moment is everything—the easy laugh, the unexpected effect, the involved dance—while the total, poetic impact of the play is nothing.

Consider just one scene for a taste of the Guthrie genius. It is only a few lines in Shakespeare and eminently forget-table. The Duke of Florence is greeting the French lords who are to fight for him. Mr. Guthrie manages to make this an enormous show-piece, fit centre for any Sunday night spectacular at the Palladium. The comic soldiers in baggy shorts, black socks and berets are lined up under a blazing sky by the side of a ruined desert viaduct. The Duke of Florence, a goateed parody of General Smuts, dodders along the line with his officers falling over him every time he halts to peer at a mysterious medal. When he turns suddenly his sword becomes entangled between the legs of his staff officer. When he tries to make a speech from the top of an observation tower, the microphone gets a fit of metallic coughing. When he attempts to salute the flag, it slides slowly down the post again. Meanwhile every man on the stage is improvising some ludicrous prank such as few amateur entertainers at a Stag Night at the Sergeants' Mess could hope to equal.

All's Well is not one of my favourite plays. It has an aristocratic lout for a hero, a cold-blooded man-hunter for a heroine, an apoplectic dictator for a deus ex machina, and some rather indifferent poetry. But a mediocre play does not become more bearable by transforming it into a bad pantomime. Mr. Guthrie's hero is deprived of even those rags of snotty grandeur in which Shakespeare dressed him. Played by Edward de Souza, he is just a stuffy, dirty-minded schoolboy. (Because Shakespeare describes 'his arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,' Mr. de Souza was naturally chosen for his flat face, stolid eyes and cropped hair.) Zoe Caldwell is still an ambulating doormat of a maiden—and often she speaks the verse with the well-elocuted precision of a schoolgirl making a presentation in a foreign language. Edith Evans is Edith Evans—an exiled queen locked away in a madhouse who still bestows her autumnal wisdom on the deaf zanies around her. Mr. Guthrie has even hit upon some brilliant and enlightening strokes of direction—Helena hypnotising the King with her rhythmic verse while she strokes away his pain, for example. The last act has some groupings which are staggeringly effective. Many of the cast—notably Anthony Nicholls, Robert Hardy, Angela Baddeley and Priscilla Morgan—stuff their hollow roles with life and spirit. But the play itself remains a ragbag of revue sketches linked by a thin and improbable plot.