[In the following excerpt, Smallwood lauds Edward Hall's staging of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, particularly the production's powerful interpretation of the play's final scene.]

Awkwardness, even ineptness, has been perceived also in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and this has led to its being regarded as Shakespeare's earliest comedy; it was certainly Edward Hall's directorial début at Stratford when his production opened in February and ‘double first’ turned out not to be too unapt for a searching, challenging production, with the alleged ineptnesses, especially in the final moments, an important part of the challenge. The journey of the play was marked by two single-gender, non-sexual embraces: at the end of the first scene by a valedictory hug of separation, expected all through the scene, between the leading men, Proteus and Valentine; at the end of the last scene, by an embrace of welcome and union, expected all through the scene, between the leading women, Julia and Sylvia. The embraces framed the intervening account of the awkwardnesses and inadequacies of the play's heterosexual relationships.

Hall's modern-dress production presented us with a rich and trivial society, Julia's and Lucetta's rather callous assessment of the former's suitors leading into a party with music and fireworks and all of them parading in with expensive presents for her: courtship had been turned into conspicuous consumption and Julia made the object of universal male desire. That idea of the objectification of woman was reinforced when we moved to Milan and the letter scene was played in a museum with a Damien Hirst-ish exhibit of a woman's head in a glass case, labelled ‘Venus’: woman as symbol of beauty and object of male desire set against Poppy Miller's gracious and astute Sylvia running rings round Tom Goodman-Hill's hopelessly uncomprehending Valentine. And at the end of the scene, ‘Venus’ turned out to be alive, the model withdrawing her head from its glass case, her body from under its plinth, and lighting a cigarette—her shift as exhibit in the world of male fantasy over. When we next met Sylvia, she was being turned into the work of art, and with grim appropriateness into a miniature. Her father was the painter, the object of his admiration also his possession, for the painter was also the keeper of the key to her prison in the tower-bedroom. No wonder Sylvia was ready to give the miniature away to the unwelcome lover whose musical attentions beneath her window had disturbed her repose.

The production was at its most interesting in a complicated reading of this serenade scene that deliberately drained it of romance. ‘If you send up “Who is Sylvia” it simply loses its point’, wrote John Peter in The Sunday Times, rather missing the point himself. By handing over a fat roll of bank notes, Dominic Rowan's Proteus had secured the services of a professional singer, with a vulgar style and Pavarotti handkerchief, to sideline, with a flashy aria in pastiche Puccini manner, poor little Thurio's exquisite lyric ‘Who is Sylvia’. Usurping the role of Julia's confidant the Host, and dressed up in clerical collar to pretend to the epithet ‘Father’ which she bestows on him, was Mark Hadfield's sad and knowing Launce, clearly determined to make her see the truth about the man she is foolish enough to love (a little like Rosalind forcing Silvius to hear Phoebe's letter): ‘I am but a fool, look you, and yet I have the wit to know my master is a kind of knave.’ The scene thus brought together the play's most generous, long-suffering, and put-upon lovers, Julia (in a touchingly yearning, vulnerable portrayal by Lesley Vickerage) of the ungrateful and worthless Proteus, and Launce, of the equally ungrateful and, in a most economically paced performance by the imperturbable Cassie, of the determinedly lugubrious and unresponsive Crab. It was a most perceptive examination of the undercurrents of the scene and a careful preparation for the play's ending.

All the superficial sophistication was stripped away for the final scene. The pretty pale blue shutters that had dominated the back wall were blasted open and the stage carpet was sucked down through a trap-door. The outlaws' hiding-place was through a grille in the floor (Harry Lime style); this was more a scene of urban dereliction than a forest, and to this place came Proteus, not just threatening but attempting and meaning rape to Sylvia, his hands bloody—from fighting an outlaw, we needed to remind ourselves, for the image was much more disturbing as he ran on stage with Sylvia, manhandling her obscenely and apparently about to expose himself as she struggled and cringed, coat ripped and stockings torn. Valentine's arrival was only just in the nick of time and Poppy Miller's face as she watched the last movement of the play through Sylvia's notorious silence was a remarkable tribute to what skilled performance can do when the author writes nothing for you. Terror, relief, approval, contemptuous disbelief, and the anguish of rejection passed in turn across her face as she held centre stage: the most important person in the scene was not invited to speak, and that told us everything about the society in which these things were happening. Then in came that society's dominant male, the boorish, cock-sure figure of Colin McCormack's Duke of Milan, handing over his daughter, taking the outlaws into his service (where, from what we'd seen of his other servants, they would be altogether at home), and presiding over the conventional embraces of the precarious pair of couples who seem to represent the future. Then off he strode, followed by the play's assembled males, leaving Julia and Sylvia to cling to each other in solace for what they had been through and, one could not help thinking, for what they would have to face in the future. There was nothing inept about this ending of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. …