To the Old Vic … goes the credit for the one production of the season that was full of interest and excitement throughout—All's Well That Ends Well. By every test it should have been a thoroughly bad one, and I have heard that a young actor-producer of talent walked out half-way through the performance declaring that he had never seen a worse. Faced with a difficult play to put over, Michael Benthall resorted to all the most disreputable tricks of the trade—drastic cutting, transposing, the masking of awkward speeches with music or outrageous buffoonery. Yet it was not only in spite of these tricks but partly because of them that the producer was able to offer a coherent, convincing, and, as far as I know, a new view of Shakespeare's play, at least to those who are prepared to allow that in theatrical affairs the end may justify the means.

The difficulties of the play are rather conceptual than verbal. We have had it drummed into us by every commentator that this is a problem play, and that its subject is 'unpleasant'—in Shaw's sense or worse. No modern audience, we are told, can stomach a hero as priggish and as caddish as Bertram, or sympathize with a heroine who like Helena is determined that a man who does not love her shall accept her as his wife, and who resorts to the most ignoble tricks to cheat him into doing so. The comic sub-plot of the Braggart Parolles is despicable in its barrenness, and the only characters in the play that deserve attention and respect are the King of France and the Countess Rousillon, who both possess a wise nobility worthy of a better play.

Benthall's first step was to take the King and the Countess down a peg. The King became a figure of fun and the affairs of his court pure farce. He was attended by a couple of comic doctors, one fat, one thin, and by a friar who kept up a running Paternoster in a high monotone. His speeches were punctuated by sudden grimaces and yowling cries as his ailment griped him. Even his lucid intervals were diversified by similar 'business'. During the long speech to Bertram in which the King recalls his youth, the courtiers began to chatter among themselves, growing louder and louder until he was driven to shout them down. When he made a joke he would pause until the court had duly acknowledged it with forced laughter. After his cure at Helena's hands he still remained something of a caricature, with the tetchiness of Old Capulet and the blether of Polonius. The Countess was not ragged to this degree, but Fay Compton played the part not as the aristocratic paragon of tradition but as a very human old woman whose nobility appeared rather in what she did than in the doing of it. She was bent and crabbed, her gestures had an arthritic awkwardness, her utterance was creaky, abrupt, arbitrary. By such treatment both King and Countess became more homely, nearer to earth, and their judgements on the action more humanly convincing from their being more than a little touched with human frailty.

To this roughly individual and 'de-idealized' Chorus was added a powerful reinforcement in the shape of Michael Hordern's Parolles, which should have utterly shattered the theory that Shakespeare's Braggart is a more than usually inept version of the dullest of all stock figures. This Parolles was brimful of vitality, and a masterpiece of comic invention. As befits one who is to be found a sheep in wolf's clothing, he began by looking the opposite, his long hungry face in itself a comic contrast to the gay Florentine doublet with its huge hanging sleeves. The wolf soon begins to look a good deal sillier, and Hordern was brilliant in inventing a series of mimes to express Parolles's attempts to maintain his dignity in face of Lord Lafeu's quizzing—hurt, and chilling at the first suspicion, a scraggy cockerel when trying to outface his tormentor, at last swallowing with anguish the sour plum of his inability to answer back without calling down retribution. His gait was as expressive as his face. His entry in procession with the victorious Florentine army, himself in dudgeon over the disgrace of the lost drum, brought down the house—a jobbling, unco-ordinated motion, head bobbing forward between limp shoulders from which the arms dangled, feet flapping carelessly down in the abandonment of utter disgust. Equally satisfying was his return, in apparent eagerness to recapture the drum single-handed, the beaky nose uplifted and seeming to draw the rigid, gawky body after it in over-acted determination. And in the climax to this sub-plot, the interrogation of Parolles by the practical jokers who have ambushed and blindfolded him, every move and every tone was deft and delightful: the anxious gabbling of the numbers as he tumbles over himself to betray the military strength of his own side, the confidential becking of his interrogator in order to impart one extra titbit of lying scandal about his superior officers, the self-hugging satisfaction at getting through the interview, he thinks, so adroitly. When Parolles is finally unblind-folded, and discovers his captors to be his own comrades, Hordern managed an immediate and breath-taking transition from farce to deadly earnest. At the discovery he closed his eyes and fell straight backward into the arms of his attendants; then, as with taunts they prepare to leave him, he slithered to the ground, becoming wizened and sly on the instant, and with "simply the thing I am shall make me live" [IV. iii. 333] revealed an essential meanness not only in Parolles but in human nature as a whole. For effect the moment is akin to Lear's "unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art" [III. iv. 106-07]; but whereas it is the physical insignificance of man that Poor Tom shows us in a flash, Parolles gives us his spiritual degradation. …

Having provided a rough and realistic framework to the drama, the producer could afford to play down the awkward facts of life in its main argument. Accordingly the story of Helena and Bertram was given the remoteness of a fairy-tale, or at least of the medieval fabliau from which Shakespeare took it. The sets immediately suggested the sense in which the story was to be read. Behind the three arches of the permanent facade a backcloth with a country scene that might have come from an illuminated manuscript created Rousillon; an equally stylized view of Florence transported us to Italy. When the action shifted to Paris, sliding panels of Notre Dame quickly blotted out the country, while in Florence the undisguised manipulation of hinged screens composed the Capilet interior. Against such ingenious and delicate stage-contraptions it was appropriate that Claire Bloom should play Helena as Cinderella. Opinions about this actress differ, and I was prepared to find no more than a beginner of talent whom youth, beauty, and an appearance in a notable film had magnified into a star. I am still in two minds about her. She moved with admirable grace, she had an appealing and ingenuous charm, and—except for a few tiresome mannerisms—she spoke musically and with authority, even managing the awkward couplet soliloquy in her first scene with a skill that made an insult of the instrumental accompaniment officiously provided by the producer. And yet her performance made no coherent impression, and the spectator was left in irritated puzzlement as to what exactly the actress had been driving at. Her vehemence in the early soliloquies—was it impulsiveness and the sudden abandon of passion long pent up? Her almost hysterical reaction when trapped by the Countess into revealing her secret love for Bertram (a scene to which Fay Compton's motherly shrewdness gave a rare tenderness)—was this violence the index of a gentle nature torn between love and loyalty, or of a wayward obstinacy? Did the aggressiveness of her rejoinders to Parolles's innuendoes come from the self-confidence of innocence or the hardness of a worldly-wise little bourgeoise? No doubt some of these conundrums are implicit in Shakespeare's lines, but it is the business of the actress to resolve them; and slowly the conviction dawned that Claire Bloom was not even attempting the task, that her emphasis came of nothing more than an eagerness to inject the maximum of feeling into every phrase and word. To be blunt, I think she was ranting—and yet she ranted distinctly, there was music if not meaning in her rant; and again what should have been a blemish turned out to be a positive contribution to the total effect of the play. A fairy-tale princess should not be too closely accountable for her actions, and the wildness of this Helena's regrets, even that trick of making her exit lines trail off on a rising intonation, like a great bird taking wing, gave an other-worldly quality to her story.

Bertram's task was easier. He had only to look like Prince Charming (which John Neville did) and to speak handsomely (which he did also). Such distinction, even unaided, might have overborne all our scruples as to the decency of Bertram's conduct, even to the shameless shifts of excuse to which he betakes himself in the last scene. This Bertram, however, was given every assistance by the producer who, taking a hint from Lafeu's "No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipt-taffeta fellow there" [IV. v. 1], made Parolles responsible for all Rousillon's misbehaviour. Bertram, too much a schoolboy still to be allowed by the French King to go to the wars, was shown taking his cue at every step from his unsavoury pedagogue. It was Parolles whose nods and becks strengthened Bertram in his first resistance to the King's command that he should marry a commoner. Having married her, he appeared to soften towards her, and would have given her the kiss she so pathetically begs at parting had not a "Psst!" from Parolles recalled him to his previous resolution. Shakespeare makes Parolles the factotum in Bertram's arrangements for the disposal of his wife; Benthall made him the prime mover as well.

King and Countess as Disney dwarfs, the hero and heroine reduced to decorative pasteboard. … Parolles taking over the play as a sort of amateurish Mephistopheles—no wonder the orthodox were disapproving. Yet to me at least this lightening and de-personalizing of the story, this removal of the play into the half-world of pantomime and Grimms' Fairy Tales, suddenly revealed its kinship not, as is usually supposed, with Measure for Measure and Troilus, but with the last romances. With these it shares the theme of paradise lost and paradise regained: the penitent Bertram recovers the wife he has cast off as surely as do Leontes and Posthumus, and his restoration to Helena makes her as much amends as the meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda does to Prospero. Here, however, it is themselves that the losers lose and find, and their redemption is their own and not the work of another more innocent generation. The pattern in this condensed form does not perhaps make so good a play as in its extended shape, where the processes are more clear-cut; but it does make a play, a much better play when seen as a first sketch for Winter's Tale than as a botched Measure.