To the Barbican from last winter at Stratford has come Trevor Nunn's enchanting All's Well That Ends Well, though in promoting Philip Franks to the key role of Bertram (in place of a curiously absent Mike Gwilym) it would perhaps have been more tactful if the management had also removed his name from the understudy list in the programme. But the utter delight of this production lies in fact in its senior casting: Peggy Ashcroft as the Countess, Robert Eddison (the actor with the most melodious voice in the British theatre, Gielgud notwithstanding) as Lafeu and Griffith Jones as the Gentleman all give vintage classical performance of a kind that have for too long been absent.

Like the late Tyrone Guthrie in his 1959 Stratford revival, Nunn also assumes that All's Well needs a considerable amount of stage help: thus we get a production set somewhere halfway from the Cherry Orchard to Oh What A Lovely War! and filled with star turns, not least Cheryl Campbell playing Diana as a World War I cafe chanteuse and Stephen Moore as the Parolles against which all others in our lifetime will have to be measured—a marvellous mix of braggart and tragic buffoon, whose subplot unexpectedly takes over and controls the whole of the second half of the evening. John Franklyn-Robbins may lack the absolute monarchical control to get us through the "Proud scornful boy" speech and the longest wrap-up in the whole of Shakespeare, but elsewhere the balance is just about perfect, not least in Harriet Walter's understanding of Helena as the great martyr-bitch.

And while she is away at the wars with the menfolk, back home in Rossillion waits the Countess in a Chekhovian twilight; Peggy Ashcroft's extraordinarily lyrical, unusually maternal performance manages with rare perfection to highlight Nunn's realisation that this is a play about the parting of two worlds, both doomed to eventual extinction, one by its own inertia and the other by the guns of war. Here as in his celebrated musical Comedy of Errors, Mr Nunn has taken Shakespeare at his shakiest and come up with a resounding if anarchic triumph.