Trevor Nunn celebrates Peggy Ashcroft's return to Shakespeare and to Stratford with a brilliant, confident production of one of Shakespeare's more subdued and troubled comedies. The costumes are Edwardian both in design and in lavish multiplicity. John Gunter's elegant basic set of white arches with glass panels and roof, initially suggesting a conservatory, is marvellously adaptable. Each episode is firmly localized. The first court scene takes place in a gymnasium, the young lords fencing and vaulting, their rude health contrasting with the King's physical weakness; but they listen respectfully to his analysis of the virtues of Bertram's father. For the second court scene we are in club-land—the men in evening dress; green shaded lamps, brandy glasses and soda syphons on the gaming tables. "Firenze", a sign announces, and the set becomes a railway station which is also a transit camp—tents appear in the background—and later a field-hospital noisily close to the firing-line. There is a splendid, on-stage band for the procession of the French army ("Drum and colours. Enter Count Rossillion, Parolles, and the whole army" says the Folio direction). Then we are in a café, the dishes of the day chalked on a black-board; here the blindfolded Parolles is interrogated, horrific instruments of torture suggested by the scratching of a fork on a tin plate. All is elegance again for the final scene, as champagne flows for the King's visit to the Countess.

Transitions between scenes, helped by Guy Woolfenden's evocative musical pastiches, are smooth and ingenious. Travelling becomes a visual and aural motif. We realize how full of comings and goings the play is as cars rev their engines and characters dress for journeys, depart with their suitcases, and re-enter with them, too, even into the royal presence.

Such specificity is inherently entertaining, and often illuminating. It suits the play's psychological naturalism, the qualities that caused Shaw to compare it with A Doll's House and its heroine with Nora. We are made acutely aware of its concern with embarrassment: Helena's as she is provoked to confess her love for Bertram, the courtiers' at Bertram's rejection of her, Parolles's when the bandage is removed from his eyes and he sees that he is in the presence of those he has slandered, Bertram's at his parting from Helena, refusing her request for a kiss, and, climactically, when faced with the evidence of his own perfidy. A place is created within the play's updated structure for the clown, Lavache. At Stratford in 1959 Tyrone Guthrie, also updating, funked him altogether. Nunn has Geoffrey Hutchings play him as a physically deformed appendage of the Countess's household, sweeping the floor, occasionally entrusted with messages. Peggy Ashcroft exquisitely defines an indulgent tolerance of his winking and blinking presence, treating him as a simpleton with his own kind of shrewdness and a power to amuse. For once, and with her help, his set-piece on "O Lord, Sir" becomes genuinely comic.

The precision of Dame Peggy's characterization shifts the balance of her role away from poetic generality to personal expression. "Even so it was with me when I was young" is not (as Edith Evans made it) a meditation but a statement. This is a practical woman, warm in her sympathies but capable of ironic detachment, most moving in the little scene (3.4) with her Steward (Bert Parnaby) in which she expresses the dilemma of her divided affections and confesses her grief.

Best of all, perhaps, the naturalism works in the relationship of Bertram and Parolles, which becomes the most interesting in the play. Mike Gwilym portrays Bertram initially as a callow cad, affectionate and respectful towards his mother but over-dominated by Parolles. His evident immaturity assists the credibility of his response to Helena's choice of him for a husband. The director builds to this moment with great skill and care. The King, in high good humour, stage-manages a parade of the young lords before Helena, and in an enchantingly pretty sequence of dances she eliminates them one by one each time the music stops, until only Bertram remains. He has joined cheerfully in the game, but anger and resentment supervene as the King enforces Helena's decision; Bertram's submission is petulant. The scene, excellent though it is, would be stronger if Helena's humiliation were more forcibly conveyed. At its end Bertram takes Parolles's cheroot from his mouth, tries to smoke it, but chokes and gives up. The handling of the exposure of Parolles is notable no less for the subtlety of its comedy than for the grief and disillusionment it arouses in Bertram, and for the reality which Stephen Moore gives to Parolles's determination to survive.

If, until the play's last moments, Bertram seems more interesting in relation to Parolles than to Helena, it is partly because the production style is less than ideally suited to some aspects of Helena's role. Harriet Walter's performance, carefully studied, graceful, often touching, nevertheless misses some of its poetic power. She is not helped by having to deliver the incantatory couplets with which she works upon the King across a table full of brandy glasses. John Franklyn-Robbins makes a fine moment of the acknowledgement of weakness in his subsequent acceptance of her help.

Diana, too, is diminished by being carefully particularized; the role loses some of the symbolical aspects hinted at in the name. It is not impossible that an attractive girl who sings seductive songs, dances and shows her petti-coats to soldiers in a café should take pride in her chastity, but it is difficult to believe that she should be "of a most chaste renown" in the camp. In the final scene, however, Cheryl Campbell gives Diana a dignity which rebukes the coarseness of Bertram's taunts. Here the production's psychological realism reaps its rewards in a complex counter-pointing of emotions. Parolles is despicable, yet Lafeu (a beautifully poised performance by Robert Eddison) is generous to him; Bertram is contemptible, but we have seen that he can learn from experience, and Helena, forgives him. If his progress to maturity is halting, yet he is willing at last to accept Helena as a wife in reality as well as in name, and to ask her pardon. The Epilogue is dropped in this production. As the lights fade, Helena and Bertram are left alone, tentatively touching hands. There is still no kiss. A precarious rapport has been achieved; the ending may also be a beginning.