The Royal Shakespeare Company staged several interesting new productions in 1982, both in London, where Henry IV opened the company's new theatre in the Barbican Centre, and at Stratford-upon-Avon, where the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre had once again been remodeled. The outstanding Shakespearean achievement of 1982 was not a new production, however, but the transfer of Trevor Nunn's 1981 Stratford production of All's Well That Ends Well to the Barbican, where it blossomed into the finest and most illuminating interpretation of a Shakespeare play for many years.

Trevor Nunn believes that All's Well is "Shakespeare's most Chekhovian play" (The Times, 19 November 1981), and John Gunter's brilliantly imaginative Edwardian sets established a very strong sense of the general period and of each of the play's very specific, sharply contrasted locations. Within a framework of elegant metal arches, sliding glass panels enabled the action to move swiftly and flexibly between the airy conservatory at Rossillion, the King's formal court at Paris, the station platform at Florence as the troops arrived there, and the marvelously atmospheric down-at-heel café run by the Widow and much frequented by the troops, which became the appropriate setting for both of the shady transactions of the second half: Bertram's pursuit of Diana, and the interrogation of Parolles.

At Stratford the general tone of the production had been intimate and conversational. The Barbican version gave fuller value to the variety of mood and human experience the play contains—from the urbane poise of Peggy Ashcroft's Countess and Robert Eddison's Lafew to the passionate resentment with which John Franklyn-Robbins' King responded to his illness, from the relaxed confidence of Stephen Moore's Parolles to the despairing intensity of Harriet Walter's Helena. The company displayed a remarkable control of rapidly changing moods within single scenes, especially in the scene when Bertram rejected Helena and in the finale.

Helena chose Bertram during a dance from which the other suitors were eliminated as in a game of musical chairs, to humorous effect. But whereas other productions have allowed the audience's laughter to continue, disastrously, during Bertram's humiliation of Helena, here the mood changed sharply: the fluttering fans which had earlier suggested social frivolity now expressed the court's recoiling from Bertram's scorn for "a poor physician's daughter" [II. iii. 115]. Bertram looked Helena straight in the eyes to say very deliberately "I cannot love her, nor will strive to do't" [II. iii. 145]; she, for her part, was furious as well as desperate as she tried forcibly to prevent the King from joining their hands: "That you are well restored, my lord, I'm glad. / Let the rest go" [II. iii. 147-48]. And Bertram's very emphatic delivery of "she, which late / Was in my nobler thoughts most base" [II. iii. 170-71] made it quite clear that he had not changed his attitude, even in the act of capitulating to the King. The mixture of compliance and stubborn individuality which emerged from this speech was a very interesting anticipation of his notorious final couplet: this was demonstrably the same man who could say "If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I'll love her dearly—ever, ever dearly" [V. iii. 315-16].

And, indeed, this Bertram was consistent right to the end. When Helena finally appeared, he went to take her hand, but didn't actually do so; instead he spoke that cryptic, conditional couplet. This wary meeting between husband and wife contrasted strikingly with Helena's intensely moving reunion with the Countess, which in its turn contrasted with Robert Eddison's impeccable timing of the line in which Shakespeare releases all the pent-up tension: "Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon" [V. iii. 320]. Left alone, Bertram and Helena walked upstage together, their hands still apart, the final image of an unequal marriage.

This ending could be presented in all its unsentimental complexity because it had been so thoroughly prepared for, and particularly because the central performances contained within themselves the variety which distinguished the whole production. Whereas Mike Gwilym had been a rather monotonously loutish Bertram at Stratford, at the Barbican Philip Franks was young, attractive, and not wholly insensitive. He did not soften Bertram's cruel refusal to give Helena the kiss she asks for; but in his next phrase, "Go thou toward home" [II. v. 90], resentment gave way to pain in his face and voice on the word "home," momentarily expressing his desolate sense of the world he was giving up. This of course gave even greater force to the moment when Helena calls him by his family name as she prepares to leave so that he may return: "come thou home, Rossillion" [III. ii. 120]. Moments like these meant that one's interest was divided more equally than usual between the two of them. They both learned hard truths during the intrigues in Florence. Philip Franks was visibly shaken by ParoUes' betrayal, another scene in which the company moved easily between humorous invention and disturbing human reality. Harriet Walter realized the full bitterness of "O strange men! / That can such sweet use make of what they hate" [IV. iv. 21-2]. But it was typical of the balance of the production that she should go on to give equal emphasis to Helena's hopes for the future:

  the time will bring on summer,
When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns,
And be as sweet as sharp. [IV. iv. 31-3]

The blend of sweetness and sharpness in that image, as in the whole play and in this production, was embodied in Peggy Ashcroft's superlative performance as the Countess of Rossillion. The Countess' bittersweet "remembrances of days foregone" [I. iii. 134], which make her so sympathetic to Helena's love ("This thorn / Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong" [I. iii. 129]) were delivered with a haunting lyrical beauty; and she brought an exquisitely compassionate humor to her scenes with Helena and with Lavatch. After Helena's "Can't no other, / But I your daughter, he must be my brother?" [I. iii. 166] the beautifully timed pause before she replied "Yes, Helen" was so eloquent that she scarcely needed to add "you might be my daughter-in-law" [I. iii. 167]. Both here and in her wry testing of Helena—"This was your motive / For Paris, was it?" [I. iii. 231]—humor and tenderness were inseparable, as so often in Shakespearean comedy. Lavatch's jokes on "O Lord, sir!" [II. ii. 41] may show no great wit, but Peggy Ashcroft took the wish for the deed, laughing and patting Geoffrey Hutchings affectionately. The warm human relationship established here between employer and clown was precisely what was fatally absent from the Stratford King Lear. …

The very clarity of this production threw its rare moments of excess into sharp relief, especially the RSC's current fetish for intrusively busy backgrounds. The court gawping in curiosity at the hunchbacked Lavatch, a bevy of parlor-maids giggling, weeping, and finally being ushered out of the room to prevent them from hearing about the young master's peccadillos—these distracted from more important considerations and were a tiresome example of Trevor Nunn's irritating habit of trying to create a "company" feeling artificially by pretending that the minor actors are as important as the major ones.