All's Well That Ends Well is a play which sports afternoon-couplets and blinks uncomprehendingly at the wisdom of the stars. Its most famous lines evoke nothing less than the birthpangs of the modern, scientific world: They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. …' As spoken by Brewster Mason's galloping Lafeu in John Barton's fine and lucid new production at Stratford, these lines were accompanied by a kind of gleeful minuet to the light of Reason on the part of Shakespeare's courtiers. Immediately the old King of France, cured from his sickness by Helena's virginal prescriptions, bounced into the court like a rejected Tory back in favour with the voters at last. His court had discovered an elixir both for old age and the mysteries of the world: a twilight sparkle of hope for a deluded world in which 'all' seemed about to do everything but end 'well'.

Barton's production stressed Shakespeare's depiction of the plight between the generations—the Passionate Pilgrim's grim message that 'Crabbed age and youth/Cannot live together'. The old people in the play are all dying like the King—paralysed by gnarled wisdom or crippled from lusting after the pleasures of the young. The young strut around the French court like nimble flamingos pronouncing public platitudes to comfort their elders but privately harbouring a craving for flight, escape, hallucination. Now the Royal Shakespeare Company is not an organisation likely to miss out on modern parallels—increasingly we learn as much about contemporary, as Elizabethan, England from their productions and programmes. What is important for us, the spectators of Shakespearean drama, is to perceive how this great Company's concern for the present, the immediate, sharpens and clarifies their treatment and vision of Shakespeare's text. The performance of Ian Richardson as Bertram is a subtle illustration of the rewards of this procedure. In Shakespeare's play Bertram is an insufferable creature—refusing to marry Helena because she comes from a poor family, then marrying her and immediately fleeing to the wars and a peasant girl in Florence. In Barton's version, Bertram is a character as precise and unfathomable as a pin-prick: a modern youth with intimations of psychedelia, trapped into staying at home by his King and a girl who has forced the termination of her virginity upon him. After the forced trip to the altar, Richardson waddled onto the stage like a drowning, stoical duck, sighing with resentment and flicking bitter confetti drops from his hat. The court think he is mad like Hamlet: Bertram decides to leave for the wars, like those teenagers at London Airport departing gleefully for Israel: 'War is no strife, To the dark house and the detested wife.'

In fact, Bertram's house is not 'dark' but laced with Rembrandtian light and shadows, effectively pillared by Timothy O'Brien's camp-Renaissance designs. Bertram's mother, the Countess of Rousillon, is played as a raucous, kindly mock-turtle by Catherine Lacey. Unlike the King she does not snarl at the behaviour of the young; she spends her days upon a bench, drenched in Chekhovian melancholy and chatting aimlessly to a bitter, world-hating clown.

The RSC usually present a Shakespearean war in the context of a Brechtian iron-age. Bertram's Florentian war is a red-flamed romp waged as a retreat from the public world (of the new Beatles LP—Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). Richardson becomes a freak Coriolanus playing with toy soldiers—his band invents a private language in order to trap Bertram's lacky, Captain Parolles. Parolles ('Simply the thing I am shall make me live'), in Clive Swift's grasping hands, sucks at the air with opportunistic apathy and whistles with glee as his betrayal of Bertram. His name (Parolles—words) reflects the contortions of his world, the suckling of a modern, nihilistic man.

Estelle Kohler's Helena flouted her virginity with swinging indifference and like Ophelia, in Peter Hall's Hamlet, she seemed more experienced than anyone else on the stage—apart from Helen Mirren as the peasant girl, Diana, who gave a defiant, National Youth Theatre debut. Helena's most effective scenes were with Sebastian Shaw's King. Shaw lay sprawled out on a sofa, like Ibsens' master builder, hiding his ears from Helena's offer of health and life. Then Helena suggests that she might have been sent by God and the old man pricks up his ears: the stars may yet be on his side!

The reconciliation scene is played as a music-box cantata of confusion. Richardson bowed down once more in front of the King whispering the familiar pious platitudes—smiled upon by his mother and a puzzled court. Critics have seen in the precarious balance of this hurried conclusion evidence of Shakespeare's growing inability to find any harmonious finale for his plays. In John Barton's production the young drifted aimlessly off the stage, while the old courtiers remained behind frightened but smiling at death.