All's Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) strikes me at present as an ambiguous play. I make the temporal qualification because I have never before seen the play staged and am rather unfamiliar with its text. My view, therefore, is not that of a critic who habitually regards Shakespeare as a theme to be taken for granted, on which the actors and director may ring changes to demonstrate their ingenuity. What I find ambiguous about All's Well now is the character of Helena, who has been celebrated as the archetype of the profoundly enamoured and loyal woman who though spurned by the man she loves wins him at last by the persistence of her passion. She is widely regarded as a noble character and Shakespeare has written exquisite words for and about her to make the opinion plausible.

Yet it is clear that the young ass she is in love with does not want her, not only for the snobbish reason he gives that she is only a poor physician's daughter, but because she obviously fails to inspire him with any male heat. Howsoever highly she may be praised for her virtues, the plain fact is that Helena goes about getting her man with a wilful cunning worthy of ladies from Shaw's Ann Whitfield through Strindberg to Mae West. Even at the end when Bertram succumbs, it is quite evident that he does so not from any desire but because he is a victim of several scurvy tricks.

All through the play there is an ironic note, a streak of bitterness, even cruelty, from which only the Countess is free. It is this note relating the play in its temper but not, to be sure, in merit or value to Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure which gives All's Well its unity. The radiant and tender Shakespeare of Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night's Dream reveals himself here in a sardonic humour, an angry middleaged man. If Parolles is an egregious hanger on, he is not much worse than most of the courtiers or the King himself, whose gift to Helena of the reluctant calf Bertram is a manifestation of callous highhandedness parading as imperial honour.

This first reaction to the play may well be a misinterpretation. But most Shakespeare productions are based on either a reasoned misinterpretation or on no interpretation whatever, for Shakespeare to most producers is an occasion for self-display rather than a dramatist with something to say and therefore something to criticise. If what I have suggested be a misinterpretation, it is nevertheless entirely congruous with Tyrone Guthrie's production.

Mr. Guthrie is a master—surely the most gifted director of the English-speaking stage. That he is sometimes a dangerous master disembowelling texts of their authors' content may perhaps be a sinister emblem of his immense talent. In this instance, however, the most striking aspect of this talent—his capacity for Gargantuan clowning—has served Shakespeare prodigiously well. It has turned the play's grimace into a gigantic guffaw.

I cannot say which is the more impressive: Guthrie's mockery of the military (modern style) and his kidding of the court, or the atmosphere of glamorous shadow he has created, the opulent disease which seems to hover over the king's council and festivities. The figures at these moments, for all their comic absurdity, are made to appear part of a puppet world soon destined to crumble into dust.

If the production does not always attain the heights of these scenes (how brilliantly staged is the dance of Helena's proposal) either the text is to be blamed or a certain lack of measure on the director's part. There is an over-extension of the buffoonery and the delicious bits of invention together with a certain neglect of the more intimate scenes where the director's rich improvisational resources go dry.

The company as a whole is very fine, carrying out the leader's dictates with as much devotion as precision. If space permitted I should cite all the actors. Edith Evans—beautifully gowned—plays the relatively small part of the Countess in a vein all her own. Her quality and manner are perhaps fortunately beyond the grip of any director. Zoe Caldwell's Helena has a clean and intelligent drive, the point of which lacks a target due either to the ambiguity in the text or the director's uncertainty as to what that target might be. Guthrie has read Priscilla Morgan's Diana as an ingenue blandly cute though somewhat indistinct in speech. For a young actor. Robert Hardy does well with the King's saccharine sting. Angela Baddeley's final exit as the widow provoked me to as much laughter as anything in this elaborate entertainment—made Edwardian-stylish and handsome in Tanya Moiseiwitsch's design which like the direction, shifts about to various tunes, most of them fascinatingly memorable.