When the Stratford curtain rises on stable men in Edwardian livery carrying modern suitcases we think we know what we are in for. Happily we are mistaken. Mr. Tyrone Guthrie rises seriously to the challenge of All's Well That Ends Well and he gets fine support from the company led by Miss Zoe Caldwell.

His production wears Edwardian dress, but it has real Elizabethan vitality and its vindication of Helena is undertaken with as much care as the uproariously funny "debunking" of Parolles.

The key needed to unlock the full meaning of this difficult comedy has yet to be found. Commentators have so far given theatrical producers little help. Professor Wilson Knight recently has striven prodigiously to fashion a key that might work, but his essay obviously came too late for it to have any influence on Mr. Guthrie's present production. We shall have to wait—probably for a long time—to see Helena brought to the stage as Shakespeare's supreme expression of a woman's love, a humble medium for the divine power which out of a contention on equal terms of male and female values achieves a mystical union between them. We can be well content meanwhile with a Helena who exists on a lower though at some points a significantly parallel level.

Mr. Guthrie is well aware of the dangers he has to guard against. It is hard for us to like a woman, however nobly she may be planned, who drives a man into a forced marriage by a trick and then by another trick substitutes herself in her husband's bed for the mistress whom he wishes to seduce. We cannot but feel that she is stooping pretty low to conquer. But Mr. Guthrie takes pains to place the heroine's constancy in the most favourable possible light. The like of a fairy tale magic plays over the scene between the king and the young woman who stakes her life on his cure. Trick it may be, but we accept it as something more.

Again, in the half-ballet treatment of the king presenting the dancing eligibles for his saviour to choose from Mr. Robert Hardy as the king makes it angrily clear that Bertram's rejection of the would-be bride betrays his superficial understanding of honour. His rejection of her almost entirely on grounds of birth is ugly in its manner and suggests that only the woman he has thus churlishly humiliated can rescue him from his baser self.

Having thus masterfully won our sympathy, Mr. Guthrie deservedly enjoys himself with a delightful burlesque of drill-suited colonial troops enduring inspection by a fussy old fool of a general and a resourcefully comic rendering of the unmasking of Parolles by his comrades. He can afterwards trust the moving constancy of Miss Caldwell to atone in some sort for the stratagem on Boccaccio's story and so bring the comedy to an end in which we can feel that Bertram's tested values as a soldier and the defective values of his judgment of men and women have been set in order by the right-willed and loyal woman who has risked so much for him. It is not often that we come away from the comedy with this conviction.

Miss Caldwell's performance is one in which intensity of purpose is blended with an appealing waif-like charm. Dame Edith Evans gives her wonderful help with the Countess of Rousillon which is exquisite in its slow loveliness. Mr. Edward de Souza is perhaps inevitably a somewhat commonplace Bertram and Mr. Cyril Luckham gives us the bright vulgarity of Parolles but scarcely brings out the astuteness of his mind. But altogether it is a highly rewarding evening.