[In the following excerpt, Smallwood examines Irina Brook's production of All's Well That Ends Well, finding that the director failed in her attempt to create a setting in which the play's folklore elements could be explored. Smallwood praises Rachel Pickup's energetic and intelligent portrayal of Helena and Emil Marwa's childlike and naïve Bertram.]

From a new ‘problem comedy’ to one for which the epithet is of more venerable vintage—but once again to a director bent on a novel and unexpected reading. Irina Brook's production of All's Well That Ends Well at the Oxford Playhouse in the late summer attempted to create a world in which the folk-story origins of the play might operate more freely by presenting it in a pastiche African world. The attempt, though energetic and forceful, was doomed to failure. Rachel Pickup's Helena, however, was so full of energy, so gracefully and intelligently spoken, and so committed in her love for Emil Marwa's boyishly naive Bertram, that much of this wonderful play's essence seemed to survive the mistaken directorial concept.

From a theatrical property basket the cast of white and black actors were presented, as the play began, with shawls and robes that suggested an African world, and when not actually performing they sat round the stage, punctuating the dialogue by playing on drums and bells. Not once did the concept help the play and at times it was violently at odds with it, not least when Bertram refused Helena with all the weight of sixteenth-century social hierarchy behind him (‘A poor physician's daughter my wife!’) and Jeff Diamond's King of France responded in terms that assume the absolute power of a Renaissance monarch, with every syllable he uttered made absurd by the fact that the crown he wore was a tambourine without a skin found in the property basket; or when Helena cured the king, not in secret through the medical legacy of her father (‘prescriptions of rare and proved effects’), but through a sort of cod witch-doctor's dance projected onto a screen with the entire cast watching. When a Shakespeare play is genuinely absorbed into a different ethnic culture, and re-presented in the light of it, the results are frequently illuminating; the external imposition of pseudo-versions of ethnicity (as with the Globe production of The Winter's Tale reviewed elsewhere in this volume), is patronizing and phoney.

But for all its self-imposed problems, the production at many points demonstrated the theatrical power of this strangely neglected play, scenes such as Helena's confession to the Countess (a fine performance by Madlena Nedeva of this most sympathetic of roles, though robbed of some of its scope by the excision of Lavatch, with whom she has such a patient and generous relationship), or Bertram's rejection of Helena after the fun of the choosing dance (here very competitive and overtly sexual, in a way that seemed perfectly legitimate), or Bertram's wooing of Diana (with its valuable opening lesson in how to fail in a chatting-up routine by getting the girl's name wrong), or the comic cruelties of the interrogation of Parolles, all coming off with fine theatrical energy. There was an interesting unscripted glimpse of the opening moments of the ‘bed trick’, with Helena, in Diana's very identifiable veil, leading Bertram lovingly by the hand to the consummation she has so long yearned for. The ending took the sentimental choice of a penitent Bertram kneeling to Helena and kissing her on ‘more welcome is the sweet’, a kiss that might have come two acts earlier as Helena begged it (‘strangers and foes do sunder and not kiss’) if Bertram had not been diverted by Parolles's loud (and calculated) drumming at the crucial moment. The production ended, perfectly in character, with a directorial misjudgement, the Epilogue being spoken, not by the King, but by the mysterious witch-doctor figure who had doubled Reynaldo and the ‘Gentle Stranger’. But for all its oddities, it had still revealed that the play's theatrical energy is more or less indestructible if the role that drives it has been adequately cast; and in Rachel Pickup's performance of Helena it undoubtedly had. The buoyancy and emotional commitment of her appeal to the ‘leaden messengers’ not to harm the arrogant young man who is, so unworthily, the object of her love, were not easily to be forgotten. …