[In the following excerpt, Wood and Clarke provide an overview of Benthall's production of All's Well That Ends Well and of the critical responses that it elicited.]

All's Well that Ends Well was produced at the Old Vic on the second night of the London season, immediately after Hamlet, and was something of a test piece from which it might be judged whether audiences would support the plan to the extent of going to see the lesser-known and indeed inferior plays.

The company were a little nervous of the probable reception on the opening night, but after the first few minutes the play suddenly began to 'go' and was received with laughter and delighted applause. Following a crop of excellent press notices there was quite a run on the box office and the play maintained throughout its 35 performances an attendance record that never fell below 75 per cent of capacity. All's Well was withdrawn on January 1st, primarily in order to make space for new productions, but there were signs by then that attendances were dropping and it seemed fair to conclude that the public for the rarer plays is, as yet, a limited and specialised one. It is, of course, not surprising that the plays with three centuries of popularity behind them should attract larger audiences than plays which for various reasons—but mostly on account of sheer inferiority—have slipped into obscurity.

All's Well that Ends Well is usually dated about 1603, the same year as Measure for Measure, with which it shares some similarity of plot. It offers less opportunity to the actors tors than the other bitter comedy, however, and is far less frequently performed. It seems to have been played only twice in London since 1852 and had last been seen at the Old Vic in 1921. (It was a happy thought of the Vic-Wells Association to mark the occasion of the new production with a sherry party for members of the 1921 and 1953 productions.)

The play is based on Boccaccio's tale of Giglietta di Nerbona in the Decameron (which would have been available to Shakespeare in William Painter's translation) and concerns the single-minded pursuit of a young Count, Bertram, by his mother's ward, Helena. She follows him to the French Court with a carefully laid plan to cure the King of a languishing illness by means of a prescription inherited from her physician father, in order that she may then demand Bertram as husband for her reward. Forcibly married, much against his will, Bertram flies to the Tuscan wars, leaving for his wife a curt note to say that when she can get a ring from his finger that never shall come off, and when she is by him with child, then she may call him husband. Helena, only momentarily dismayed, gives out that she is dead, disguises herself as a pilgrim and sets off for Italy. There she substitutes herself in the bed of an Italian girl who has made an assignation with Bertram. Having fulfilled both conditions, Helena later presents herself before Bertram at home at Rossillion, where he cries 'O pardon!' and presumably lover her for evermore. The Life Force is triumphant and Helena's victory over Bertram is as complete as that of Ann Whitefield over Jack Tanner—which may explain why Shaw once said that All's Well was the best play in the canon.

The character of Helena gives the dominant flavour to the play. If she is admired and accepted in her machinations, as indeed all the other characters and presumably Shakespeare seem to have admired her, then the play itself may also give pleasure. Hazlitt found Helena a character 'of great sweetness and delicacy' and the play 'one of the most pleasant of our author's comedies', and Coleridge described Helena as Shakespeare's 'loveliest character'. More recently, Dr. Edith Sitwell has found her 'irresistible with the force of Spring, the ferment, the mounting sap', a character to be forgiven all because of her force of life in a community of old and shrivelled people. To Mr. Harold Hobson, however, she is a forward and revolting girl, 'a designing minx who grabs a husband through her bullying skill in driving a bargain, and retains him by means of a trick that would give pause even to an American farce-writer'. Mr. J. C. Trewin obviously agrees, calling Helena a 'heroine who has been praised with extravagance, but who, for all her fine speeches, is a calculating little opportunist'.

The hero is hardly more endearing. At the beginning he may win our sympathy with those two cries from the heart,

O my Parolles, they have married me!
                                      [II. iii. 272]

and

               War is no strife
To the dark house and the detested wife.
                           [II. iii. 292]

But the cowardly lying and dissembling when he is taken to task at the end is not easy to stomach. He has no champions in the play—even his mother calls him 'this unworthy husband'—and few outside. Dr. Johnson spoke for most people when he said roundly: 'I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate; when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by false-hood; and is dismissed to happiness'.

The older people in the play have all the warmth and wisdom. The old Countess, the kind Lord Lafew, even the French King, all do their best to promote the general happiness, but they remain but shadowy characters and the one gigantic over-coloured yet real and human personage is the knave Parolles, own cousin to Pistol, moving in slightly higher circles yet victim to the same weaknesses of boasting, lying and dissembling, undismayed even when cruelly scratched by Fortune and making virtue of necessity:

           Being fool'd, by fool'ry thrive.
There's place and means for every man alive.
                                  [IV. iii. 338-39]

In the Old Vic production Parolles was certainly given his head and from peacock-preening start to bedraggled finish he almost carried the play. The emphasis was kept on comedy by the producer in that the more serious scenes were the most heavily cut and the Duke of Florence was omitted altogether. On the other hand, two wordless comic characters were introduced, Lafew's daughter Maudlin, a simpering and quite pathetically ugly damsel, and a servile monk attending the sick King, who burst into terrified chanting at his royal master's every spasm, while the King of France himself was played as a figure of fun, a fretful invalid, bundled up in nightshirt and cap, with crown askew, and attended by doctors who hovered round with potions and basins.

This approach was adopted deliberately by the producer, Michael Benthall, because he found parts of the play bawdy and unpleasant and thought the plot would be distasteful to a modern audience. He aimed, therefore, to remove some of the bitter taste from the play and to give it instead a touch of fairy-tale unreality, tipping it into fantasy in the manner of Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring. With this object in view he invited Osbert Lancaster to design the costumes and the settings to be used with the permanent proscenium arch. The backdrops, clear and bright like cut-outs from a child's picture book, and the fresh colours of the costumes, admirably succeeded in creating a fairy-tale atmosphere.

A pastoral backdrop suggested the estate of Rossillion and a hot Tuscan landscape was used for the Italian scenes. Tall folding doors between the arches created the interior of the Widow's house and Diana appeared on one of the balconies above the side arches for her scene with Bertram. For the scene in the French Court these 'balconies' were filled with stained glass to represent windows and little Gothic buildings were pushed on at the back of the stage, in the manner of toy theatre slides, to make up the background.

The result of this approach was to divorce the play from any semblance of reality and turn it into a quick-moving farce. In this guise it won many laughs and one could hardly take seriously the match-making activities of such a high-comedy King. Yet had the more serious scenes been played with more belief the real comedy might have increased in stature; as it was, Parolles was almost extinguished in the Court scenes.

The old Countess was given her full measure of sweet chiding seriousness, and in the early scenes the Lord Lafew, white-haired and rosy-cheeked, was an endearing meddler and never a bore, but towards the end he too seemed to get rather out of hand, and the introduction of Maudlin—although it won gales of easy laughter and did perhaps enliven the endless riddles and muddles over the ownership of the ring (how clumsy is this scene compared with the end of The Merchant of Venice)—was a rather cruel and unnecessary joke which also belittled Lafew and made him appear ridiculous.

Two critics in particular deplored the comedy treatment. J. C. Trewin, cherishing a personal affection for this King who, in the early scenes, 'should have an autumnal frailty', thought the production was sadly cheapened by a regrettable bit of fooling—'the more regrettable because, elsewhere, Mr. Benthall's handling is often lively and tactful. …'

The Spectator critic, on the other hand, was very indignant about the whole production. 'Prettying up Shakespeare just won't do; it invariably leaves the producer without a play. No one so far as I know has commanded the Old Vic to present the whole of the First Folio. If one of Shakespeare's plays is not considered good enough as he wrote it to attract a contemporary audience, the thing for the Vic to do is to leave it alone until a properly subsidised National Theatre can put it on … with truth and good taste—without undue fear of financial disaster.'

This was a minority view, however, and Eric Keown spoke for the majority when he said in Punch ' … we gain a sort of surface plausibility; and laughter is the kindest anaesthetic against the increasing outrage of the plot'.

The outrage of the plot was glossed over, also, by Claire Bloom's performance as Helena, an April creature of quick tears and laughter in the early scenes and strangely moving in her very stillness and solemnity at the end. By playing Helena quite straightforwardly as if she believed implicitly in the character's behaviour, Miss Bloom suspended our disbelief as long as she was on the stage. As The Times put it: 'Miss Bloom … is the conventional heroine of fairy-tale romance who never stops to think of the ethical implications of the things she does, but does them because she has a natural impulse towards heroism; and her pursuit of the unwilling Bertram is nothing if not heroic'.

John Neville had no hope of making Bertram heroic, but played him with considerable spirit aided by a handsome voice and presence. Fay Compton as the wise old Countess gave a performance of sweet reasonableness and understanding that came as near to the heart of the play as any character. Michael Hordern, given full warrant for clowning by author and producer alike, managed to make Parolles not only a flamboyant figure of wickedness and guile but a lovable rogue as well. The amount of relish he extracted from some of the verbal comedy was extraordinary, and the whole episode of the drum was a glorious example of timing and variety. (The pillars of the permanent set were a great asset in the scenes of the baiting of Parolles: they provided excellent 'cover' for his tormentors and were nicely used for general comic business.) Long after the rest of All's Well is forgotten, we shall remember the contempt with which Hordern inquired

Who cannot be crush'd with a plot?
                                 [IV. iii. 325]

The other characters had less opportunity but Gwen Cherrell was a lively Diana, with a merry wit and sturdy good sense that contrasted nicely with the less cheerful Helena. William Squire contributed one of his quavery, kindly old men as Lafew, and Laurence Hardy gave a good performance of a silly and sickly King who had no real right to be in the play at all. Timothy Bateson's portrait of the shrivelled little clown Lavache—'A shrewd knave, and an unhappy' [IV. v. 63]—was original and as satisfying as anything he did during the season.