If the Royal Shakespeare Company invented one style for Shakespeare's histories, they have perfected another for comedy, elegant, decorative, urbane and at its best last week in All's Well That Ends Well at Stratford. John Barton's production is nothing if not suave—easy to see why this play appealed so little to the nineteenth century and so much to the eighteenth. It demands an elaborate stylistic virtuosity which has only recently crept back on to our stage, the same judicious sophistication which marked, also last week, The Farmer's Wife at Chichester.

Neither play is in the least "realistic." Both are exceedingly well-made. And here the audience who, for purely aesthetic reasons, clapped entrances and exits in The Farmer's Wife seemed sharper than the critics who contemptuously dismissed it as a phoney country chronicle, cheap, insincere and not like D. H. Lawrence. On this view, All's Well ought logically to be written off as an arid, schematised fairy-tale which ends in artificial tears: "Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon." The whole centring round a magic virgin and turning less on sentiment or character than on potions, arbitrary tricks and riddles—Shakespeare, in short, turning out something very much like the Iris Murdoch of his day.

But this is to ignore what Mr Barton fastidiously brings out, the play's gravity, its complex architectural and musical beauty. Like Clifford Williams's Twelfth Night last year, this is a Renaissance production, and has the same sober, sweet lucidity. Only where that diffused a sense of Shakespeare looking back to the giddiness of youth, this looks forward to autumn and old age. Timothy O'Brien's set is a severely formal wooden archway, changing colours to reflect the play's elaborate pattern—soft browns and russet, dried leaves and spiky seedheads for the Countess's household at Rousillon; sombre deep blue hangings and a pair of flickering candles for the King's sickbed in Paris; and a brilliant transformation scene for the military in Italy, with drooping scarlet banners, red-tasselled spears, soldiers wheeling and marching in time to the muffled barks and howls of a gargantuan drill-major—fit setting for the energetic middle section, Parolles's downfall, Helena's hard bargaining, Bertram's playing at lust and war.

Ian Richardson's Bertram makes an exquisite pair to his Coriolanus a few weeks ago—basically the same part, man and boy, only Shakespeare left out nearly all Bertram's speeches. But this harsh and haughty lord—'his archèd brows, his hawking eye, his curls' set off to admiration against a Cavalier's lace collar—is also very young indeed. And his extreme youth makes his relationship with Helena both subtler and less sordid than it seems on the page; adds, in fact, a prickling sensuality, the sense of a boy pampered and caressed by women, too tender to be 'the mark for smoky muskets.' It explains, for instance, why the more boorish his behaviour, the more covertable he seems to Helena—for here, as with Orsino, cruelty is inseparable from sexual desire. At the same time, this Bertram has a delicacy and grace which makes Helena's speech on virginity, his own shrinking from the thought of bed, his cold refusal when she pleads for a kiss—half timidity, half physical repulsion—and his lascivious awkwardness with Diana, seem variations on a theme which is resolved only after the long, harsh baiting at the end, in a sudden and benign acceptance.

If Mr Richardson's performance is one pole of this production, Brewster Mason as Lafeu provides the second—another of Mr Mason's indolent, smooth men who watches Bertram's antics with the inscrutable complacency of superior age and wisdom. This Lafeu is master of the graceful insult, the thrust and lazy flick, prodding Parolles as he would a ripe and squashy insect. Clive Swift's Parolles is comic only in the act of being so delicately splodged. Sebastian Shaw's King, Catherine Lacey's Countess are properly solemn in the shadow of the grave, Elizabeth Spriggs is ravishing as the frisky widow, Helen Mirren as her daughter is nicely wanton in her panting, passionate scene with Bertram, and Ian Hogg plays the wry and mournful fool, for reasons of his own, as a thug from an animated Giles cartoon.

The only serious objection, in fact, to this production is the casting of Estelle Kohler as Helena. Miss Kohler has improved out of all recognition since she played Olivia as a boisterous hockey-captain last year, and even since her weepy little wife in Coriolanus; but, though this reading allows tantalising glimpses of Helena's austere and fragile grace, Miss Kohler remains a principal boy at heart, a youthful version of Miss Mary Martin in Hello, Dolly!, with the same sauciness, the same brassy, waggish grin, the same naughty feeling that she is about to wink or slap her thigh. And here Mr Barton also slips into a coarseness—our heroine perched on the bed and rumpling up the blankets to titillate the dying King, for instance—which is positively gruesome in contrast to the subtle, sober richness, the haunting melancholy of what is otherwise an uncommonly civil production.