FringeReview UK 2024

All’s Well That Ends Well

Shakespeare’s Globe The Sam Wanamaker

Genre: Classical and Shakespeare, Comedy, Drama, LGBT Theatre, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Music, Theatre

Venue: Shakespeare’s Globe

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

How do you solve a problem like All’s Well? This knotty play-cum-fairy-tale with a woman driving the plot ought to be popular: but her love-object is the least sympathetic romantic lead ever to be “dismissed to happiness” as Samuel Johnson scathes it. All’s Well That Ends Well at The Globe’s Sam Wanamaker directed by Chelsea Walker till January 4^th has an answer.

If it’s entered under Folio ‘Comedies’, treat it as high-comedy: amp up clarity, slapstick on occasion, with lucidity blazing like a gunpowder trail or barium meal, depending on sensibility. So the kinks of the plot’s clear to all. Team with actors who speak verse with verve, rubato and affect: more consummately at the Globe than I remember (excepting the marvellous Francesca Mills as Duchess of Malfi: and a fine Othello team).

Finally, strip fairy-tale, sleek out the eddies of clown speeches and some period trappings, though swords can’t be banished so contemporary military gear sorts ill with them and court absolutism; not to mention the thrill of gender-roles reversed. Further, retain the plot’s letters and eschew a world of phone-texts. Two hours fifteen and it lands.

Briefly, Helena through curing the sick King of France asks for the hand of a court bachelor and chooses Bertram whom she’s adored since childhood. He’s appalled, enforced and vanishes to the wars with impossible conditions on consummating their marriage. Helena secretly pursues. Bertram learns a supposed friend’s betrayal and lusts after another woman. Cue the infamous bed-trick and a superb denouement, which sings in this production.

Simon Slater’s score with Angela Hicks’ soprano pulsing an exotic melismatic cry haunts the opening and suggests a different play: candles, merely lowered and raised here, flicker over a white-mirror floor and Rosanna Vize’s gorgeous set; with gallery full of panels painted in the same style as the Wanamaker’s cerulean-and-white ceiling. This being the French Court Vize has gone Versailles Rococo with Jacobean retro.

To that alien cry Ruby Bentall (Poldark’s Verity) as Helen (not Helena, for no reason) enters like all characters at first in black (Vize and co-costume designer Megan Rarity), circling Kit Young’s Bertram till all actors join, in Ninja shades never seen again. It’s echoed after the interval in full battledress. In between there’s more individual wraps: for the King of France (Richard Katz) undressed and dressed, Helen in nun garb, Lafew (Emilio Doorgasingh) and a shimmering Diana (Georgia-Mae Myers) and her mother Widow (Catrin Aaron) matte-clad.

Bentall’s quicksilver Helen speaks and swerves her verse, full of impulse, fire and agogic hesitations, where she catches her own daring. There’s something of Patsy Ferran’s energy and inwardness, though Bentall brings a different radiance: her Helen seems capable of fierce joy, signalling desire with frank simplicity.

Nevertheless Bentall first explodes with tears so much people titter: it’s not for her father though. This slight rough-hewing of Helen’s desire banishes the passivity foisted on women of the time. So Helen and would-be-stepmother Countess Rossillion (Siobhan Redmond) dismiss the Countess’s habitual drawing-out. She knows why Helen weeps. Redmond is as fleet as Bentall, as no-nonsense, warmly impatient of modesty. Indeed she reserves a paint-stripping denunciation for her son.

As Bentall collapses on her knees; Redmond radiates love for her hoped-for daughter-in-law. Whatever she protests, it’s clear she loves Helen more than Bertram. Elsewhere it’s active badinage, the brio of two women plotting.

Some two months ago this stage hosted Middleton’s A Game at Chess depicting a Spanish Ambassador with fistula. Katz’s King stumbles in fistularic pain, self-pitying, then after his cure stentorian in rude health. Like Doorgasingh’s Lafew, Katz seems more mob than court, burling with occasional menace.

Doorgasingh savagely taunts Bertram’s friend, military coward (and bar) Paroles. His powerful Lafew also once acts out of character over Helen: which, considering he suspects foul play and is prepared against self-interest to denounce, jars a little. His later brusque kindness to Paroles can’t quite be explained by doing it with his back to him, though it works.

Young’s dismissive Bertram, as he instructs Helen at the beginning, seethes with clarity though little room for reflection: there’s not much to go on. His disabusing of Paroles’ qualities though, is complicated by mutual desire. When he tries boarding Diana with a croony 1950s-style guitar serenade it’s literally speaking the language with a stranger’s accent. Unlike Paroles Bertram can lust after women too. His final shock realisation of what mutual desire he did enjoy might take a lifetime to unravel.

Helen’s desire for Bertram is echoed by Italian Diana, as Myers more than once expresses it, shimmering in her dress as a woman deserving more than bed-swerving. Her recognition she can never husband Bertram is delivered with mildly bitter regret, as she and Widow Aaron (warmly sceptical, plain-speaking) accede to Helen’s wishes and all grow in stature. That both Helen too deserves sexual admiration is briefly shown as French courtier Sachin K Sharma warmly expresses readiness to marry ‘lowly’ Helen.

Augmented by Kevin McCurdy’s fight direction, Dumaine (Kwami Odoom) and Morgan (Adam Wadsworth) as well as soldier Caroline Moroney, emerge with a vividness and dispatch outside their Paroles-unmasking scene replete with invented language. Their regret at Bertram’s desertion shows more courtliness than the court.

Bertram’s Paroles is in William Robinson’s hands dangerous. Unlike the Countess, his innuendoes to Helen are barbed, since when he and Bertram meet his desire for him ends in a reciprocal kiss, one later transferred (a transference of grace? telegraphed by intimacy director Lucy Fennell) to Helen by Bertram; in a far more amorous one than you’d expect: but it’s coded.

Robinson seems escaped out of a cabaret in his light pink suit. He’s eventually stripped to the waist and tellingly remains so. The disdain everyone but Bertram has for him (particularly Lafew) seems homophobic: it fuels what Robinson suggests is braggart over-compensation. His disparagement of Bertram now smacks of rejection.

Robinson’s final speech though after being exposed is radiant with self-knowledge. “Simply the thing that I am shall make me live” is uttered with an “I am what I am” Cage aux Folles paean of self-affirmation.

There’s been accelerated interest in this rarely-performed play (curiously popular in the 19^th century). After Marianne Elliott’s 2009 fairy-tale National with Michelle Terry dodged the dark, Caroline Byrne’s early 2018 #MeToo at the Wanamaker featured Imogen Doel’s Paroles and water-immersive healing: more, teenagers growing and melting with a child at the end.  Blanche McIntyre’s RSC of 2022 signalled dangers in Instagram-style visuals but Tom Littler’s 2019 Guildford/Jermyn Street nailed it. The Westermark Effect, neutralising sexual feelings in those growing up together works for Bertram who loves Helena as a sister. She though ideates the young count. Hannah Morrish radiated heartbreaking lyricism, echoed throughout the fine cast of just six.

Walker’s production doesn’t quite touch that aching tenderness, and the dream it’s framed in, which makes Littler’s for me the finest All’s Well I’ve seen. But it was a chamber production. Walker’s scores in storytelling amplitude, humorous clarity and crystalline verse-speaking; a revelation in Robinson’s and Young’s Bertram/Paroles bromance; and in Redmond, Myers and above all Bentall’s breaking out of gendered roles, a thrill of discovery. Bentall’s Helen enters near the top of the list.

Musicians: Composer Simon Slater, Musical Director/Percussion Louise Duggan, Soprano Angela Hicks, Cello Mera Raja, Guitar Ashley Blasse

Director Chelsea Walker, Set Design and Co-Costume Designer Rosanna Vise, Movement Director Michela Meazza, Fight Director Kev McCurdy Intimacy Lucy Fennell

Co-Costume Designer and Costume Supervisor Megan Rarity, Globe Associate – Movement Glynn MacDonald, Head of Voice Tess Dignan

Head of Stage Bryan Paterson, Head of Wigs, Hair and Make-up Gilly Church, Head of Wardrobe Emma Lucy-Hughes, Head of Company Management Marion Marrs, Head of Props Emma Hughes,

Stage Manager Julia Reid, DSM Caoimhe Regan,  ASM Josh York, Casting Becky Paris CDG. Line Producer Cynthia DuBerry.

Published November 22, 2024November 30, 2024 by Simon Jenner