The only common view about All's Well that Ends Well is that it is not Shakespeare's best play. It lacks both a central character and an identifiable central theme and although it cannot be categorised as anything other than a comedy, it is not very funny. Having some fondness for the piece, my own view has been that the best way to approach it is to play up the part of Helena, the woman who cures the King of France of his near-fatal illness, and is allowed to pick the husband of her choice (Bertram) as a reward only to find that he rejects her and goes off to the wars. She catches up with him in the end by conceiving his child while he thinks he is in bed with another woman.

That is emphatically not the view of Sir Peter Hall, making a return to the Royal Shakespeare Company after 20 years absence. Hall's approach is to play the piece slowly, even ponderously, warts and all, just in case we miss anything. At the end of the first half, I thought that he was overdoing the literalness at the expense of enjoyment. The second half, in which he developed an anti-war theme, is very good indeed. In the end he has directed the play at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in the way it appears to have been written: an imperfect, puzzling piece full of reminders of characters in other Shakespeare plays, but none of theme developed.

Hall's central figure is Parolles, a follower of Bertram, who claims to be full of military expertise and magnificently played here by Michael Siberry. There is a touch of Malvolio in him, but also of characters from Ben Jonson. In the first half he is teased for being extravagantly over-dressed. However, there is more than a touch of Falstaff: not Falstaff the drinker of sack, but the cowardly braggart who ultimately realises the horrors of war more than his fellows. The contrasts between Siberry in his early finery and later tatters and the changes in his physical movements are breathtakingly stark.

By stressing the role of Parolles, Hall has not solved the problems of the play. The chief riddle is Bertram. It is understandable that he should object to having a wife foisted on him by the King of France, but that is no reason why he should be so grotesquely rude to her. There are elements of Coriolanus in him, even to having a similar kind of mother.

Bertram is an impossible part to play convincingly and it is a tribute to Toby Stephens (as it is to Hall's direction) that he gets better as the play goes on. As his mother, Barbara Jefford is impeccable throughout. Richard Johnson's King looks strikingly sick at the start, but becomes a dominant figure towards the end. And if you want an example of how to play a small part to perfection, watch Andrée Evans as the widow who helps to arrange the bed-trick on which the plot turns.

Helena, as played by Sophie Thompson, comes out as a mousy-looking woman, whom one can well understand Bertram wishing to avoid. There is little evidence for this in the text and indeed it would add to the magic of the play if she were allowed to be one of Shakespeare's most vivacious heroines, making Bertram's rejection of her more inexplicable and therefore more interesting. After all, she is an intelligent, inventive woman. Why can't she be attractive as well?