John Barton's production of All's Well that Ends Well, now moved to London from Stratford, surely makes this play the most pleasant of Shakespeare's "unpleasant" comedies. A spirit of avuncular kindliness prevails, embodied in Sebastian Shaw's King of France and Brewster Mason's Lafeu, and, indeed, Ian Richardson's unfledged Bertram is precisely a young man to need a kindly uncle's care.

Consistently, even Clive Swift's Parolles is just a little bit adolescent underneath all his bluster. Catherine Lacey's Countess is less emphatic, but equally fashioned to fit. The one newcomer to the cast is Lynn Farleigh, who has replaced Estelle Kohler in the role of Helena; gaining confidence through the evening, Miss Farleigh makes a promising debut.

Whatever darker sides the play may have are hardly visible here. The king's ailment. Bertram's enforced nuptial and his desertion of his bride, the bed trick that substitutes Helena for Diana, and Parolles's betrayal of the army with which he serves—they may read like a catalogue of horrors, but at the Aldwych they are well wrapped in good humour.

In the months since All's Well opened at Stratford, the actors seem to have found more of the quietly comic moments—Bertram cheering Helena's suitors on, not knowing he is to join them; the recently bedridden king dancing on stage after his cure; Lafeu looking Parolles up and down and inquiring, "Who's his tailor?". And the encounter between Lafeu and Parolles is still a little masterpiece of comic engineering.

John Barton with Gareth Lloyd Evans (interview date 1972)

[In the following interview, Barton discusses his approach to All's Well That Ends Well in his 1967 production and additionally comments on the roles of Parolles and Bertram.]

[Evans:] The evidence seems to be that in the past Parolles was regarded as one of the greatest comic characters, as indeed I believe Shylock was. Would you agree that audiences nowadays don't find him as funny as apparently they did in the past … Parolles I mean, not Shylock?

[Barton:] No, I wouldn't agree with that at all. I think that whether he is funny or not depends simply on how good the actor is who plays it. There are many parts in Shakespeare which may seem to be dreary if they are not brought alive by the individual talents of the actor. But provided that Parolles is well acted, I am sure he is still funny in the theatre today.

I remember with a great deal of pleasure—I don't know whether you do—Guthrie's production of All's Well. I felt both affronted and delighted at the same time. I suppose it could be said, although I wouldn't necessarily say so myself, that Guthrie seemed to be implying, in the way he directed the play, that it could not really appeal to a modem audience, so something pretty drastic had to be done; so, for example, he introduced an amount of farcical business, including a microphone. Some might say that this kind of behaviour clashed with, for example, great performances such as Edith Evans gave us as the Countess Rousillon. Do you think that All's Well is viable to a modern audience - without gimmicks?

I certainly came to think so after doing the production. At first I was afraid of directing the play, and hadn't originally been going to do it. I had to take it over quickly because a director dropped out. I remember saying to the actors at the outset, 'Let's try and trust this play, explore it and find out how it works, and stage it simply without gimmicks.' We then found after a couple of frightened, doubtful weeks, that the play was coming alive. I believe, from that experience, that the play does work without jazzingup, though I wasn't sure whether it did when I embarked on it. I ended by thinking the play much finer and more cohesive than I, or, indeed, most people had ever suspected. I think that what Guthrie did was brilliant; but he was always more a man of immense theatrical imagination, a giver of great delight, rather than someone who really tried to explore the content of a play. I think he overlaid plays with much creative invention but did not always try to realise their actual contents. As far as gimmicks are concerned, I think the question is whether an individual piece of business is an inventive overlay, or whether it's a truthful bodying-out of what's implicit in the text. But perhaps in the end it rather comes down to a question of taste.

Would you agree that the difference between Guthrie's attempt to make All's Well speak to the twentieth century and your own (or indeed the Royal Shakespeare Company's attempt to make a play speak to the twentieth century), is between what you've described as Guthrie's inventive overlay and what you would accept as a matter of principle? Does that make sense? In other words, whereas Guthrie seems to try to speak to the twentieth century by a kind of sensationalism, or theatrical effect, you personally, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, would attempt to make Shakespeare speak to the twentieth century on the basis of a certain attitude, a certain set of principles, a certain philosophy about the twentieth century, that you yourself or the Company have?

I never personally think very much about the twentieth century. I simply read the play intensively in the study, and then work on it in the rehearsal room by responding to what the actors offer. My response is as often intuitive as it is analytic or rational. I say 'Wouldn't it be good if … ?' and then try to test a particular idea in terms of whether it tallies with what I take to be the play's meaning. I never consciously take a twentieth-century approach to the play. It's very difficult to define the process that goes on in the rehearsal room: instinct is a great matter—directors and actors work together on instinctive ideas which bubble up from day to day, which they then test with their reason. We sometimes cut things out because we think they are an overlay on the text, and sometimes leave them in, hoping and trusting that they are an embodiment of something implicit in the text. This process is certainly influenced by the fact that we are people living in the twentieth century. But as often as not we also try to modify our modern responses by asking 'What does Shakespeare really mean here? Are we distorting him by doing something which we want him to mean, because it appeals to us?'

Do you regard the ending of All's Well That Ends Well as a cynical one, or do you think that Bertram has learnt from experience? Indeed, what has he learnt?

I don't think Bertram's learnt very much; he's grown up a bit, he's learnt to value Helena more than he valued her at first, he's seen through Parolles, but he's still a pretty selfish and stupid man. I think that 'cynical' isn't quite the right word for the ending: the tone is more one of a worldly tolerance of people. There's no certainty that Bertram and Helena live happily ever after. Bertram ends with a couple of very spare lines which don't tell us much: 'If she, my lord, can make me know this clearly,/I'll love her dearly ever, ever dearly' [V. iii. 315-16]. Their surface meaning is clear enough, but in the context of the whole scene, they also contain shame, awe of the King, and a resolve, at that moment, to make the best of things. Whether Bertram did in fact love her dearly ever is something which is surely made questionable by all we know of him from the play as a whole. And the end situation is well summed up in the text itself when the King says 'And if it end so meet/ The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet' [V. iii. 333-34].

PRODUCTION:

Elijah Moshinsky • BBC

Television Adaptation • 1980

BACKGROUND:

Moshinsky's television version of All's Well That Ends Well is considered by many commentators to have been among the most successful productions in the BBC Shakespeare series. Critics particularly praised the director's highlighting of the domestic nature of the play through a sensitive use of lighting and the framing scenes in a manner that evoked seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Reviewers were less united in their appraisal of the production's performances, however. While Kenneth S. Rothwell deemed Ian Charleson "superb as the snotty Bertram," G. M. Pearce maintained that Charleson's sullen portrayal of the young man struck "the only discordant note" in the production. Critics were similarly divided over Donald Sinden's fruity rendering of the King, which Jeremy Treglown characterized as both lecherous and "hammy." Angela Downs's Helena impressed commentators with her crafty intelligence and serenity. Rothwell noted that her "plain, spinsterish, puritanical face with the unruly strands of hair conceals a volcanic disposition." Other favorably reviewed performances were Michael Hordern's Lafew, Celia Johnson's Countess; and Peter Jeffrey's Parolles. In explaining the success of Moshinsky's translation of the play into the medium of television, G. K. Hunter concluded that it seemed "to accept the inevitable diminution in theatrical power that the translation involves, and tries to invent new relationships which will … compensate for that loss."

COMMENTARY: