Shakespeare in the Round

The Drama Club's production of All's Well That Ends Well was a bold venture in so many ways that it could easily have flopped. The play is unfamiliar and commonly regarded as one of Shakespeare's worst, muddled in its action and nasty in its material. The staging was unusual, with three platforms in the body of the theatre and the audience around them, scarcely any scenery and no curtain to veil the comings and goings of the actors. The costumes, too, were unconventional, not, the programme told us, just to be novel but to help capture the mood of the play. The boldness paid off; the play came across with a liveliness few had expected and was enthusiastically received by many who had written it off as dull and unpleasant.

This success was achieved to some extent in spite of the professed aims behind the experimental staging and costuming. We were told that Helena was to be seen as a resolute go-getter whose determination we must admire however little we sympathise with her methods. It was this conception of her as a "Shavian super woman" which prompted the use of Edwardian costumes; she was to be as modern and as unsubmissive as any of the modern dramatist's heroines. In the actual performance the Helena of Donella Palmer was very little of this. At no time did she lose our sympathy or provoke our displeasure and her rich costumes, which were as much traditional as modern, served to emphasise the departure from the interpretation of the part we were led to expect.

Bertram, the Countess and Lafew fitted in well enough with Miss Palmer's Helena but Parolles was so exactly typed by his costumes that he seemed more like an Evelyn Waugh militarist than the boisterous braggart whose deflation by Helena in the first act is but the prelude to his complete discomforting at the end of the play. We were hardly conscious of him as the uninhibited mis-leader of youth whose loquacity undoes him. The clown, Lavache, was altogether too off-hand for the important lines he has in the many-voiced consideration of love and nobility and his relationship to the central characters not very clearly established.

If these parts seem to have suffered from the conception of the play as belonging to our world there was a great deal gained by the staging of the play in something like the Elizabethan manner. Scene followed scene with just the right pace and the complicated plot was much less tedious than reading of the play had suggested. Nola Millar's talent for getting people moving and speaking with a minimum of fuss and by-play was obvious throughout and the experience of a Shakespeare play as primarily something to be spoken was a most satisfying one. The three platforms restricted the actors at times, especially in the last scene and, in the taunting of Parolles, room should have been found for Bertram to be more than a bystander on the floor. The final entry of Helena was disappointing; this is the crowning moment of the play and she had far too little room and time to make it that. Would one central platform have been better?

Allowing for disagreements about the interpretation of the play and some of its characters, the acting was very good. David Vere-Jones had a command of movement and gesture as impressive as his fine speaking of verse, and whenever he was on stage others seemed to rise towards his level. Irene Demchenko similarly spoke and moved very well and Bernard Grice, after a rather uncertain start, was a fitting third to these others in the ranks of the older generation from whose presence this comedy of young people growing up takes so much of its meaning. John Gamby, as Parolles, I have mentioned already as failing to give the part the full-blooded energy it needs, but his performance early in the play as a rather cynical spiv was great fun in itself and at the end his dejection had just the right note of good humour about it to make Lafew's favour towards him completely convincing.

The minor characters were not always given full weight and some of the peaking of verse and (more surprisingly) of prose was too elocutionary or hurried. Geoff Henry as Lavache was irritatingly full of gestures which distracted the attention from what he was saying. The naturalness of the movements about the acting area which the production called for helped the inexperienced actors and only in the scene where Parolles is unmasked were the minor parts seriously slack.

John Reynolds as Bertram got all the rashness and impetuosity that are called for and in the last scene made the most of his all too few lines. He kept the audience sufficiently sympathetic to him as a young, unseasoned courtier to make Helena's regaining of him more satisfactory an ending to the play than many consider it. Donella Palmer, as Helena, had a splendid ease of movement and expression and her interpretation of the part gave support to Coleridge's much-maligned description of her as "Shakespeare's loveliest creation". Without playing down the ambition in her love or her readiness to use the means which come to her hand this Helena was enough to debunk her severest critics.

As a whole the production had a polish and precision in its lighting and sound effects, much superior to those in earlier major productions and, if more attention to the speech and gestures of some actors would have brought an improvement, the larger considerations of Miss Millar's production were more than adequate. The success of the staging emphasised the success of the whole venture in taking a neglected play which too many read without witnessing and showing it to be, if not the best Shakespeare, at least very good theatre and in flashes as excellent as many more familiar plays. It was fitting then that the outstanding performance of the production was that of Mr. Vere-Jones as Lafew and the reality he gave to a part supposedly tedious and fatuous was an indication of how worthwhile it is to see Shakespeare and not just read him.

—S.J.