Its unattractive young hero—silly, selfish, snobbish—makes All's Well That Ends Well a notoriously difficult play; there seems to be so little in Bertram for Helena to love. By a desperate stratagem she forces him to marry her, but after the ceremony he will have nothing more to do with her; she remains faithful, suffers humiliation and indignity for his sake, and in the end is reunited with him. Readers of the play are apt to ask why this should have to be; Bertram hardly seems worth all the trouble he causes. The challenge for actors and directors is to show us that it does have to be. One of the many virtues of Sir Peter Hall's new production is that it manages to bring out an underlying necessity in the action.

For one thing, this Helena is not quite a paragon. Sophie Thompson plays her as a wide-eyed innocent, slightly awkward in bearing, wholly intent on getting what she wants, wanting nothing that can be discreditable to her because she is so innocent, but quite capable of wanting what will harm her. She is very close to a child and has the power to impose her childish conviction on others. When, at the end of it all, she has fulfilled the impossible conditions for her reunion with Bertram, she has the absolute faith of a child in the written word: "And look you, here's your letter. This it says. …"

Bertram and she are kneeling face to face, he because he has been utterly disgraced before the king, she because kneeling makes two of them alone together as she feels they should be. She starts to read the letter, pointing with her finger at every significant word: "When from my finger you can get this ring, And are by me with child. …" Then suddenly, and at last, an adult understanding takes over, the rest of the letter is summed up in a comprehensive and dismissive "etcetera" and she tears it in half, cancelling the bond to which Bertram had subscribed, inviting him at last to commit himself to her freely and afresh. It is a beautiful moment, but also an enabling one for the whole of the play, because it turns out to be about beginning as well as ending; a future comes into sight that has the power to dissipate all our impatience with what the young people have been. They had to be as they were for us to experience this as it is.

The production is intense and powerful. The bare stage of the Swan puts all the emphasis in how characters relate to one another. Body language throughout is significant.

It rarely signifies happiness. Of the major characters, only the old courtier Lafew, very well played by Alfred Burke, is unoppressed by life. Bertram's mother wears mourning throughout the play; her love for her son is tempered by irritation, her love for Helena by anxiety. Bertram is insecure, neither a child nor a man. The king's sickness makes him self-conscious and moody. If this is a comedy, we are infrequently reminded of the fact.

In this production something perverse in human nature has to be extirpated. The comic scenes which Shakespeare wrote for the subplot of Parolles, the braggart whose cowardice is exposed when his companions persuade him that he has been seized by the enemy, were never, perhaps, very funny; they smack too much of the enjoyment of cruelty. But in this production they are hardly funny at all; Parolles undergoes an agony of humiliation, roaring out his self-shame in shameful betrayal of his own side. It is an anticipation of the process which Bertram undergoes in the very last scene, a kind of burning-out of the moral canker. Reynaldo, the steward to Bertram's mother, is presented as a Puritan; he appropriately inhabits a play of such dark moral colouring.

God seems to be on Helena's side; she uses a kind of religious chant when she promises the King that he will have his health restored, "the greatest grace lending grace"; and there are other touches that suggest a providential involvement in her affairs. If there is, the sense of this production is that man very nearly disposes of what God proposes.

It all makes for an enthralling three hours of theatre, and for the most part it convincingly holds together the odd blend of realism and folk-tale in the play. Nevertheless, there are limitations. The price paid for coherence is a certain thinning-out of character. Parolles's "Simply the thing I am/Shall make me live" loses the hint of human resilience of which it is capable; Helena is made to seem simpler than she is. When she talks of Bertram's "bright radiance and collateral light", there should be a sense of her intelligent imagination reaching out to define the quality of her love—but these words sound beyond the simple single-mindedness of Peter Hall's heroine. It is a virtue of his production, however, that it makes you think that the fault might be Shakespeare's rather than the director's.