They say miracles are past, says Lafew in Act II, scene 3 [II. 1-3] of All's Well That Ends Well, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. By choosing to set the play at the end of the nineteenth century and (at times, it seems) the beginning of the twentieth, Trevor Nunn has evoked an age when Shavian philosophical persons were crying down the supernatural and causeless and finding in humanity itself the Life Force that changes the world and gives its inhabitants what they want. The spirit and enterprise of Helena, Parolles' optimism that simply the thing he is shall make him live and the success of the old doctor's 'receipt' are part of this world. This Parolles is an amiable realist, a coward still, but with shades of Bluntschli the 'chocolate soldier' about him. Helena is now reminiscent of Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman, who inspires confidence as a person who will do nothing she does not mean to do, but she does not (as Shaw's character does) inspire the fear that she will probably do everything she means to do without taking more account of other people than may be necessary and what she calls right. At the same time, Nunn's production has a Chekhovian quality. Its impressive, beautiful, shifting scenes move from country house to gymnasium, palace ballroom, Florence railway station, trattoria—and back again to the conservatory of the Countess's house, with its subtle autumnal lights and shadows. There is a strong sense of a journey that brings Bertram and Helena back where they belong: at the beginning of the play we see two shadowy figures dancing a tentative waltz in silhouette, before the screens slide across and the furniture of the countess's drawing-room is brought in; as the lights fade before the interval Helena stands, one arm raised against the door-jamb, gazing into the world outside the château; at the end Bertram and Helena move, hesitant and not quite holding hands, towards a new life. Without convincing the audience that there is something deeply unsatisfying in the conclusion, the production respects the conditional mood of the king's All yet seems well …

In the first scene Bertram leaves a world of love—the giggling troubled chambermaids suggest that he has been the observed of all observers in this little community—in which the Countess is the central figure, linking in her affections youth and age. The fine balance of her opening words (In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband) is maintained: this world is wistful, not melancholic. We sense throughout that Rousillon is an accommodating home, in which it is affection that is remembered, and where Lavatch has his place as well as Lafew. The bond between Peggy Ashcroft's Countess and Geoffrey Hutchings' clown is succinctly conveyed in the care with which she straightens his muffler as he sets out for Paris, and the pat on the head she gives him before he shuffles off. The courtesy of her talks with Lafew illuminates our sense of a considerate, kindly woman at ease with her contemporaries and able to make the young feel easy in her presence. It is a community of solicitude in which even Rinaldo, with his notes on Helena's overheard intentions, seems considerate rather than nosey. Nunn extends this to the army and the diplomatic corps, making the Dumaine brothers earnest and compassionate spectators of Bertram's career. Their discussion is IV. 3 of Bertram's dealings with Diana and Helena (for they are given the 'first' and 'second lords' Unes) is the culmination of observation that has run through the play. This gives As we are ourselves, what things we are! [IV. iii. 20] a fresh authority: reinforcing its connection with Parolles' acceptance of the thing he is and with the play's central 'problem'—what sort of thing is Bertram?

Mike Gwilym plays Bertram as a callow, often graceless youth, sometimes awkward (he doesn't even put his case down to shake hands with the King), often spiteful (especially in Here comes my clog [II. v. 53]) and, for all his preening himself after the event, distinctly unskilful in handling Diana. He offers her a chair, but she sits in another one; he pours champagne, but she doesn't drink; he tries to deny the ring as an honour 'longing to his house [IV. ii. 42] but can't argue when she flings his own words back at him. This Bertram's embarrassment is disturbing and inescapable, from his callous partings with Helena to his boggling shrewdly under the interrogation of the King. People are constantly offering affection, but a confused, adolescent sense of his need to assert his own worth drives him away. The affair with Diana looks to him like a triumph, but Parolles' shameful unmasking is Bertram's as well. Then, just when we think he has been chastened by experience, he starts lying to the King. This Bertram is beginning an education when he takes up his marriage again. In a final scene where he is driven into isolation by his deceit, crushed by what he insists (like Parolles in his hour of crisis) is a plot, he is at last offered redemption through Helena. His silence seems (at least, to this observer) to come from astonishment as much as from a fixed habit of callousness. Bertram's if seemed wondering rather than sceptical, admiring rather than conditional. Nunn—with the help of his lighting designer—gives us the picture of Helena, upstage, bathed in rose light, radiant in herself, a figure returned like Hermione and Thaisa from the dead, but he holds the moment only for the time it requires, before moving back to the explanations required by our philosophical persons. The actress herself—Harriet Walter—has the ability to project passion and reason, so that Helena's 'revival' is a mystery of human resourcefulness rather than divine intervention. From her first-act discussion of virginity,—when Parolles speaks directly to her own feelings without being himself aware of anything other than the pleasure of talking bawdy to a maid—to the stratagems in Florence, she seems capable of being innocent without needing to be ignorant of sexuality and the world. Her pilgrim's dress suggests a red-cross nurse rather than a religious enthusiast, a pardonable sleight of the costume-designer's hand. Her selfless determination to leave Rousillon (at the end of III. 2) seems an appalling self-sacrifice but a logical one, given the selfless quality of her love: She does not suggest cunning, or the desire to find Bertram out, but at the same time she does not seem mawkishly devoted. She is a 'New Woman' of the 1890s in love, not a mid-Victorian heroine.

The cohesion and persuasiveness of the production are remarkable: it does not forfeit the Shavian realism, but avoids the cocksure, throw-away cynicism that can attend it; it maintains its wryness, but achieves the satisfaction of en ending which one recent critic has summed up as "a mood of hope and promise, satisfying our expectations and leaving us with a belief in the possibility of future joy." The final contrivance is Helena's, time's and intellect's and is to be rejoiced in—not the dramatist's, to be caviled at.

Some details jar. The scenes in the trattoria behind the front line are amusing, but do not quite fit with the widow's reputation as landlady to pilgrims (surely the noise from downstairs disturbs their devotions?). Diana (Cheryl Campbell) is a cabaret artiste with a good line in saucy songs for soldiers (one of Miss Campbell's own composing, entitled Je m'en fous!), and this sorts uneasily with her reputation for chastity. But other incidental matters are satisfying to a remarkable degree—notably the relationship between Lafew (Robert Eddison) and Parolles and the shrewd, unhappy Lavatch. It seems entirely appropriate that Lavatch should be the last to leave the stage before the formal exit of Bertram and Helena—a touch of scepticism, but no more than that.

This is a handsome and illuminating production, leaving the audience convinced that there is a problem in All's Well, but that it is a problem of life, not of an imperfection in the playwright's art. We accept that it is against the odds, but we applaud the miracle of Helena's triumph.