All's Well That Ends Well, the masterly production which closed the 1980-I season, was explicitly and persuasively Edwardian; Proust rather than Dickens was its tutelary novelist. Rossillion was here very much provincial France, hot, dusty and contentedly remote. The Countess interviewed her clown (a rustic Toulouse-Lautrec) against a background of grey shutters and potted orange trees, while a distant bell and a twitter of bird song sketched in the landscape of Provence. Marcellus was Marseilles Station in the era of the steam train, and the King of France in the final scene looked like nothing so much as Napoleon III on a private visit to the Riviera. Throughout, the vivid sense of life in a late nineteenth-century French country-house was reinforced with touches of Upstairs, Downstairs. In the gaps between scenes a covey of maids romped or tidied, and when Helena returned from Paris in 3.2 her late arrival got them excitedly out of bed to let her in (a piece of atmospheric timing which led to some discreet rewriting—this Helena proposed to 'steal away' not with the 'dark' but with the 'dawn').

Trevor Nunn and his designer, John Gunter, carried off this chronological transposition with immense assurance. But the distinction of the production was that the striking décor was not merely picturesque. Helena's uncomfortable self-assertion was given an intellectual context by dressing her as a nineteenth-century New Woman. And, more subtly still, the sleepy sense of eternal afternoon which hung about this rural Rossillion made it possible to feel a degree of sympathy for Bertram.

At Stratford everybody's least favourite Shakespearian hero appeared as an overgrown adolescent desperate to escape from home and mother, and to live in a world of men. The manifest charm and comfort of Peggy Ashcroft's Rossillion ménage merely made this need more imperative. A teenage crush on a flashy cad like Parolles was natural enough when life as a mother's boy loomed and the only other models of male behaviour were an elderly steward and a crippled clown. Mike Gwilym's Bertram, consequently, treated Helena less as a social inferior than as one of the apron strings which he needed so urgently to sever, and played the first scene in a breathless rush to get out of the front door before he was stopped.

The nineteenth-century setting brought faint memories of Julien Sorel or Lucien Chardon to this eagerness to shake the dust of the terroir from his feet and make a career in Paris. The cluster of solicitous maids underlined his hunger for the company of men. Suffocating in a provincial boudoir, he clearly could not wait to breathe the sour air of the locker-room.

By one of this production's most brilliant touches, a locker-room was precisely where he next found himself. The King of France, though confined to a wheelchair, was in the gymnasium with his officers when the young Count Rossillion arrived at court. Their fencing and vaulting were so exciting that Bertram could scarcely keep his eyes on his monarch; the delivery of urgent dispatches by a pair of pioneer aviators brought an intoxicating whiff of the great world outside. An exquisite transition from this electrifying activity to the remoteness and tedium of the country, at the beginning of 1.3, brought the point unforgettably home.

Back in the country, meanwhile, a very remarkable performance was being given by Peggy Ashcroft, returning to the Stratford stage after an absence of thirteen years. Her hands flickering with the nervous precision of pointers on a dial, she handled Harriet Walter's raw and uneasy Helena with surgical delicacy. This, one felt, was a woman who had suffered and remembered the sensation, and who could combine worldly wisdom with profound personal engagement. 'Yes, Helen, you might be my daughter-in-law' [I. ii. 167] was delivered with extraordinary warmth and weight while a distraught Helena, unable to face such frankness, stared desperately into the audience.

A mother of this emotional power and intellectual skill might indeed drive a Bertram, however incoherently, to flight. And when, the gymnasium having given way first to an officers' mess and then to a belle époque ballroom, he was picked out by his bride in an elegant version of musical chairs, a sense of being dragged home to mother lay behind his dismay. In this production 'the dark house and the detested wife' [II. iii. 292] seemed, simultaneously, an absurd description of domestic life with Helena on the Countess's sunny and gracious domain, and an entirely reasonable account of how a young man in Bertram's position might see it. Helena did not seem wrong to want Bertram. But she did seem wrong to want him so soon.

This remarkable transformation of an unsympathetic play about worth rewarded into a sympathetic play about growing-up involved, of course, a certain amount of playing against the text. When the production transferred to the Barbican in July 1982, and Philip Franks replaced Mike Gwilym, the interpretation became more coherent but less exciting. Franks offered adolescent weakness rather than adolescent self-assertion. The benefit of this was that it came as less of a shock when, in the final scene, Bertram's horror at the prospect of marrying Diana reveals him to be a snob after all. The cost was a distinct lowering of the erotic temperature. Gwilym's rude and reckless Bertram might be immature, but he was clearly worth waiting for, even suffering for, as a sexual partner. This, importantly, meant that the customary contradiction between Helena's public intelligence and private stupidity was for once abolished. The New Woman seemed no more a fool when picking a husband than she had done when curing fistulas.

Trevor Nunn gave Helena's final entry an appropriate air of the Late Plays—an orange evening glow and a hush as absolute as that which greets the waking of Hermione's statue. But the sanctified atmosphere, magical though it was, rapidly modulated into something else. At the end of the play (the Epilogue was cut) Bertram and Helena were left nervously together, just touching hands. Shame and shyness were the predominant emotions. But under them was a distinct sub-text of aroused curiosity, and turbulent memories of a night spent together in Florence some months before. A prologue had shown two shadowy figures waltzing together. It combined excitingly with the final tableau to suggest a couple both together and apart.

Two other aspects of this important production demand to be mentioned. The Florentine wars were played as an exuberant version of the First World War on the Italian Front (Caporetto, after all, was very much Parolles's sort of battle). Cheryl Campbell's Diana, at some peril to her 'most chaste renown' [IV. iii. 15] appeared as a popular chanteuse in a crowded soldiers' estaminet, stray shells interrupted Bertram's promotion, and Helena's pilgrimage was to serve as a VAD in a casualty clearing station. The other matter of note was Stephen Moore's astonishing performance as Parolles. Arriving silently on Florence Station, at the end of 3.1, equipped for the war with his golf clubs, he survived a genuinely disturbing interrogation (spoons scraped against the estaminet's tin trays cruelly suggesting instruments of torture) to give a riveting account of 'Simply the thing I am' [IV. iii. 333] Standing motionless in a cold, blue light, Moore seemed on the verge of tears, yet judged and aimed the moral language of his self-analysis with cold precision. This was Trevor Nunn's last production at Stratford before the opening of the Barbican absorbed his energies. It combined sympathetic intelligence and emotional daring in a way which will make it a landmark in the company's history.