Among The Shakespeare Comedies, All's Well that Ends Well is the wryest, the loneliest. Though long ago I acquired a taste for its verse, even for the jingle of the couplets, nothing has reconciled me to its fierce little heroine ("My intents are fixed, and will not leave me"), or to the youth she pursues with a single-minded resolution.

At Stratford-upon-Avon now, in a blessedly direct production by John Barton (with Timothy O'Brien's Caroline décor), Estelle Kohler does very little indeed that could win me to Helena, but Bertram is transformed by one of the finest Royal Shakespeare actors, Ian Richardson: making no excuses for the man's weakness and arrogance, he does get us to listen. Elsewhere, all's nearly well, and apart from an expected exuberance in the Florentine scenes, the revival is a model of restraint and dignity. Alas, it may not be fully recognised, for the comedy was born to be an outsider; Stratford's first audience responded most, and as usual, to the tricking of Parolles, whom Clive Swift—speaking with a metallic precision—presents as the hollowest of braggarts. Pistol would have approved. Even if he collapses at the end into abject servility, one feels that, being Parolles ("Simply the thing I am shall make me live"), he will survive.

I have special pleasure in the early scenes, and, guiltily, in the periphrastic, incantatory couplets with which Helena soothes the weary King; Miss Kohler, otherwise repetitive and mannered, can deal with these, and Sebastian Shaw has a silver wistfulness. I shall remember Catherine Lacey's beautifully autumnal Countess, Elizabeth Spriggs—who can do marvels with a phrase—and Helen Mirren as the Florentine widow and her daughter, and Brewster Mason as the courtier Lafeu. With respect to Mr Barton and his actor, Ian Hogg, the clown Lavache is a part practically impossible: Guthrie, in 1959, cut it altogether, and we cannot blame him.

All's Well, I fear, cannot succeed entirely unless its Helena performs for us a miracle equivalent to her curing of the King, and at Stratford Miss Kohler has not yet this quality. Still, the strange piece must haunt the mind. It never asks for our affections—it goes out of its way to flout them—and yet I think of it more than of some of its famous competitors.