In the Swan, Peter Hall's revival of All's Well That Ends Well is the RSC's most lucidly exciting close contact reappraisal since Deborah Warner's of King John. Hall's classical puritanism, often a neutralising factor in his born again, scrupulous phase, here delivers fresh-minted goods.

Helena, whom Coleridge considered Shakespeare's loveliest creation, cures the King of France's fistula, chooses the socially superior Bertram from a youthful parcel of noble bachelors' as her reward, and pursues him to the Italian wars where she snares him in a bedtrick.

Hall's actors, like Jonathan Miller's at Greenwich in the mid-1970s, are clothed in stately Caroline costumes. Richard Johnson's palsied Sun King sets the gruff tone of peremptory choice and moral finality. John Gunter's tilted, frosted screen is a discreet background from which are suspended architectural models of the Rossillion country pile, the Parisian palace and the Tuscan churches.

Whereas Trevor Nunn painted All's Well in a gorgeously Chekhovian cinematic gloss 10 years ago, Hall's emblematic, austere approach takes you right to the heart of every knotty speech and twist of plot line.

The speaking is of a bell-like, revelatory clarity. Sophie Thompson's Helena is beautifully poised between innocent fervour and inventive righteousness, while Toby Stephens makes of Bertram an emotionally clenched and shifty cry-baby finally saved by Helena's example. Anthony O'Donnell succeeds in making something both sinister and funny of the thankless clown, Lavatch, and Barbara Jefford as the Countess and Alfred Burke as Lafew exude experience and twinkling dignity.

The production is especially good at suggesting an erosion of moral standards between the generations. Michael Siberry's brilliant and rasping Parolles is no more despicable than his contemporary Bertram.

Parolles's torture and humiliation becomes the most powerful sequence in the play, and one where Bertram sees the turpitude of the times. In the past, Parolles has been generally played as a bemedalled ninny. Siberry's great performance, wreathed in anxieties and evasions, reveals a more complex and tragic character.