[In the following review, Lindop offers a rather negative appraisal of Matthew Lloyd's production of All's Well That Ends Well, commenting on the production's lack of emotional warmth and “unwelcoming” set.]

Austerity is the keynote: for the Royal Exchange Theatre itself—relocated, after last June's bombing, to the elegant but bleak caverns of Upper Campfield Market—and for this production, set in a stiff and chilly version of the 1930s and holding throughout to the sombre economies implied by the all-black costumes of its opening stage-direction.

All's Well is the most problematic of problem plays, mixing fairy-tale with grimly unattractive realism. Helena, offered her choice of husbands after healing the stricken King of France, chooses the unpleasant Bertram, a cynical philanderer who rejects her and takes off for the wars, which he views as an inviting opportunity for irresponsible adventures in sex and violence. Helena follows in disguise and wins him back by the predictable bed-trick, standing (or rather lying) in for Diana, the Florentine girl Bertram is bent on seducing. In the process, she fulfils the conditions of Bertram's oath not to see his wife again until he wears her ring and carries his child.

When, back in France, the supposedly dead Helena reappears with these titles to matrimony, Bertram undergoes an instantaneous moral reform of which no proof whatsoever is shown, while the King, apparently impervious to the lessons of experience, invites Diana to choose herself a husband. … The ironies of the title are obvious, as are the problems for the audience. What does Helena see in Bertram? What kind of relationship can they have? How can the folktale rituals of the magical healing and the bed-trick remain credible in the same play as Bertram's complacent cynicism and the cowardice of his braggart friend Parolles?

Such things can be made to work; but they demand a certain inconsequent theatrical magic. Matthew Lloyd's production rejects this possibility from the start by eschewing any touch of emotional warmth, deploying its cast in stiffly stylized groupings and displaying each in cool isolation. Ashley Martin-Davies has created an interesting but unwelcoming set, the floor an expanse of dark, glassy marble fractured by numerous cracks, a kind of cold flamboyance exemplified also by the white lilies placed on a block of perspex centre-stage in the first scene. These touches point up Helena's speech about virginity, but stress only its coldness and not the rather more human idea that Helena would actually prefer to lose hers to her chosen man.

The characters seem to take their cue from their surroundings. David Bark-Jones's Bertram, immaculate in the dark suit of Act One and still unruffled in brown battledress half-way through a military engagement in Act Four, is stiff and restrained throughout—convincing enough when paired off against his will with Helena, but disappointing when he is supposed to be seducing Diana. Diana, played by Polly Moore, seems equally immovable; some, at least, of her lines are coquettish and vulnerable on the page; but Moore speaks them as if she were leaving a business memo on an ansaphone. James Smith as the wheelchair-bound King looks convincingly frustrated, but delivers his lines in a toneless shout which soon becomes tiresome. Trevyn McDowell's Helena is likeable, but fails to make psychological sense of her part, or to generate any feeling of magic except at the moment of the healing, where her ritualistic and hypnotic tone of voice suggests for an eloquent moment what is missing from the rest of the production.

The saving grace of the evening is Alastair Galbraith's Parolles. Perhaps because irredeemable from the start, he is blessedly exempt from the icy self-control exuded by the rest of the cast. He relishes the restlessness of his own needling rhetoric, exudes weaselish energy in his movements and, duped by his comrades into thinking himself a prisoner of the enemy, throws himself with masochistic gusto into betraying his own side and defaming his “friend” Bertram. When the humiliating trick is revealed, he delivers his great soliloquy of disillusion (some of Shakespeare's most haunting and unparaphrasable lines) with touching and powerful conviction: “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live. … There's a place and means for every man alive.”