by William Shakespeare
Directed by Blanche McIntyre
Designed by Robert Innes|Music by DJ Walde
Rosie Sheehy- Helena
Benjamin Westerby- Bertram
Jamie Wilkes – Parolles
Bruce Alexander- King of France
Jessica Layde- Mariana
Claire Benedict- The Countess
Simon Coates – Lafew
Will Edgerton – Lavache
Olivia Onyehara – Diana
Sophie Cartman – Rinaldo / Duke of Florence
Funlola Olufunwa – Widow
Eloise Secker- Younger Dumain
Micah Balfour- Older Dumain
Laila Alj – 1st soldier
Oscar Batterham – Lord 4 / 2nd soldier
Callum Coates – gentleman
Matthew Duckett – Lord 3 / 1st gentleman
Ewan Orton – Lord 2 / Escalus / Messenger
Thom Petty- 2nd gentleman
Joeravar Sangha – Lord 1 / Page / Antonio
The RSC claim they’ve now achieved their aim of presenting all of Shakespeare’s canon in what was originally going to be 5 years, but then it became nine, and it has been extended by Covid. All’s Well That Ends Well is a fortuitous title to end with, but as people pointed out on the RSC Facebook page, they have not done Henry VIII or Pericles yet. If they’re basing it on the First Folio, Henry VIII (All Is True) is in there, even if agreed to be a collaboration with John Fletcher. Pericles, like Two Noble Kinsmen, did not appear in the First Folio, but is generally accepted as part of the canon … and they have done Two Noble Kinsmen. I suspect that the absence of The Swan theatre for repair may be partly to blame … it was where less popular plays went.
The RSC last did All’s Well That Ends Well in 2013, with Alex Waldmann as Bertram, Joanna Horton as Helena and Jonathan Slinger as Parolles (REVIEW here). It was hailed by some as the best play in a very strong season, though I thought the 2013 As You Like It even better. That production made me think the play unjustly under-rated, but then we saw a traditional version at the Wanamaker Playhouse in 2018, which was pedestrian.
I’m reminded of Ben Elton’s stage version of The Upstart Crow when the servant (Bottom) tells David Mitchell’s Shakespeare that he’s getting obsessed with “plot hinges using people shagging the wrong woman in the dark”. He means Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Ben Elton wasn’t the first to mention it. This is from the 1963 Folio Society edition:
The plot, creaking and groaning with improbabilities, which can only be resolved by that hammiest of all Elizabethan gimmicks, THE GREAT BED TRICK, can barely have sufficed to hold the reader’s interest in the original Boccaccio conte; transferred to the stage it demands of the audience a suspension of disbelief which even Shakespeare’s skill and language are powerless to achieve … … (so, the producer) is perfectly justified in using every trick of the trade and every elaboration of setting, for all of Shakespeare’s plays, All’s Well That Ends Well is the least likely to suffer from over-production.
Osbert Lancaster, Folio Society edition 1963 (Lancaster designed the 1953 Old Vic production)
The casting and trailer augur well then. Go for a radically modern version. After Rosie Sheehy’s astonishing and triumphant performance as King John in King John – I’ll never forget her hungover king, crown askew, eating cornflakes – we thought when we saw her as Lady Anne in Richard III this year, there must be a lead role just around the corner in this season, and here it is. Helena.
As this is not among the best-known plays, a plot summary.
Helena is the daughter of a physician employed by the Count of Roussilon / Rossilon. It starts with the count’s coffin being hurried across the stage, draped in the tricolour. Her father is already dead. Helena has long loved Bertram, the new Count, from afar.
She is a ‘gentlewoman’ to his mother, The Countess. Bertram, on becoming a count, leaves at once for the royal court. The King of France is extremely ill, probably dying. Helena offers to follow and cure the king with her father’s remedies. The deal is if she doesn’t cure him, she will die. If she does cure him, she can choose anyone in the land as her husband. She cures him and chooses Bertram, who is appalled, as an aristocrat having to marry a mere doctor’s daughter. Shakespeare knew about aristocratic attitudes to the new professional middle classes. Bertram decides to flee with his pal, Parolles, who is a vain boasting soldier. They go with other French soldiers to join the Florentines in their war with Siena. Bertram declares he will only accept Helena as his wife when she has his ancestral ring, and she is pregnant with his child. As he refuses to sleep with her, this cannot happen.
Helena disguises herself as a pilgrim and follows him to Florence. Bertram is now intent on seducing a young girl, Diana. He even offers her the ancestral ring. Meanwhile, the French / Florentine soldiers resolve to capture and put a hood on Parolles and terrify him into apparently betraying his own companions.
Helena persuades Diana to agree to go to bed with Bertram, but Helena will replace her in the dark and have sex with him. She does. She gets pregnant. She gets the ring. Thus it all, uh, ends well.
The issue on all these problem plays is the line between comedy and tragedy. Rosie Sheehy is a superb actress, told here by the director to play it straight and tragic in stalker mode. It starts so well with her in school uniform, with an unrequited crush on Bertram, but it doesn’t develop. Every critic liked her, as did I, but, having seen her before, I thought her ability was under-used.
The best thing about it is Rosie Sheehy in the lead role of Helena … you may not have heard of Sheehy, but she hits her consonants crisply, makes sense of the free verse, and has a certain stage presence.
Quentin Letts, Sunday Times Culture, 28 August 2022
After her King John we were expecting similarly stunning choreographed dance routines. There aren’t any at all in the first half, and just one free form disco dance in part two. No ending dance. Knowing the abilities of this cast, that was a massive missed opportunity. There are scenes where my brain is screaming to re-direct them. Take her arrival to cure the King. This actor can do feisty, fierce and brash. This was a scene where she could have stormed in like a snake-oil seller at a carnival with a cure-all potion. My goodness, she could have done it. Instead it was under-played. They decided to dress her as a frumpy adolescent with an inappropriate crush, and stick with it.
After she cures the King of France, the projected iPhone news says ‘The king is cured and all of France danced the (whatever)’. In any musical, that would be an instant cue for a dance which is what I would have done. Sadly, this production failed to spot the cue.
We all know the screw in the dark is the mountain the play has to surmount. Then you cast a short redhead with long straight hair (Rosie Sheehy) against a much taller and more slender actor (Olivia Onyehara) with thick heavily braided hair as Diana. OK, it’s gender blind, colour blind and accent blind, but why on Earth set yourself a major issue by making it any sort of possibility whatever-blind by casting such physical opposites? They’re casting Diana as another gawky adolescent. A dramatically good-looking and sexy Diana is the other way of doing it, to me the obvious one.
The swap is done by having similar tops and trousers and florescent green wigs in a disco. Bertram confusing them because of the wigs? No one ever got THAT pissed. I commend the Wanamaker Playhouse production at The Globe from 2018, which I otherwise disliked, for making some sort of sense of the scene.
Jamie Wilkes was a show-stealing Parolles. He was dressed like an American survivalist Trump supporting 6th of January hippy / wannabe Rambo in what must have been an uncomfortable muscle suit (which later gets removed on stage). It’s a memorable performance and you can see why you’d focus the production on it. However “selfies” are funny once or twice. This production hit “Oh, no, not again!” The American accent seems to go halfway, so maybe we’re meant to see his wannabe Rambo was also a fake Rambo, to go with the muscle suit.
The interrogation scene is always funny, with his captors pretending to speak a made-up language, with an interpreter conveying their meaning to the hooded captive. Wilkes plays it so well, but as a hooded prisoner is threatened with mock hanging and mock shooting. The interpreter has a Slavic, I think actually Russian accent. While that worked well in the play, I may be getting sensitive in my old age. I felt in the context of the horror of the current Russian atrocities in Ukraine, that it all sat uncomfortably with comedy. On the other hand, I can’t see any real accent being inoffensive, unless you stick within the British Isles. I would have done that. Siena and Florence are not leagues apart.
McIntyre exaggerates the cruelty of this gulling, even introducing a mock execution. Parolles (in a dazzling performance from Jamie Wilkes) becomes a quasi-tragic character. Wilkes is compelling but the action’s comic-tragic balance is disrupted.
Claire Brennan, The Observer 28 August 2022
Bruce Alexander, one of the ultimate TV police officers, was in our ELT video drama English Channel 3: Double Identity. The two older white males, Bruce Alexander and Simon Coates gave a master class in acting, especially in the final scenes. The King of France can so easily be a mere plot carrier, but Bruce Alexander dominated those last scenes with so many shades of emotion. A small touch I liked was his throne having the French flag one side and the EU flag the other.
Simon Coates as Lafue was always commanding and brought much needed humour to the most mundane of interchanges. I thought both of them (with Jamie Wilkes and Rosie Sheehy) towered over the rest of the production. Their ability, born of experience and full attention to their craft, did not extend to all of the younger cast. Three other reviews point the contrast between the clarity of their delivery and that of some of the other cast members.
After seeing Alex Waldmann’s marvellous Bertram in 2013, I’m going to be cruel. This Bertram was not a contestant. It’s the alleged lead. He’s not ready for it. Though it’s partly the interpretation. He does the earnest well, but doesn’t show us (or isn’t directed to show us) the extent of the towering snob who feels himself too important to marry a physician’s daughter. Then he has to be lascivious in pursuit of Diana, and that’s too polite and done on a Smart Phone. You need a touch of Old Etonian in both the snobbery and the inherent belief in droit du seigneur when pursuing Diana. We need more obnoxious. A Rees-Mogg snob turning into a Boris lecher?
They advertise this as a 21st century take, accentuated by a video trailer of Rosie Sheehy posing and pouting with various bits of bright make-up. There is nothing of this whatsoever in the play. They left her dowdy and in old fashioned school uniform, standard nylon wedding dress and bland summer frocks with no make-up apparently (OK. Made up to look like no make-up.) The trailer has zero connection to the production and misleads to the point of Trades Descriptions Act. They did exactly the same with Arthur Hughes in the Richard III trailer, focussing on the lead actor as a celebrity, done at a guess many months before rehearsals, or knowing the concept. A travesty. What were they thinking?
The concept of 21st century is endless smart phone jokes with a bit of screen projection. Screen projection is this year’s yawn. A dozen years ago, every production had to use showers and rain on stage and soak the poor cast. Then they found a more washable stage blood and every production had buckets of the stuff chucked about. This year every theatre in the country seems to have found a reliable instant projection system. Even my granddaughter’s dance school production at Poole Lighthouse used it, and actually it was just as good as here. Once you embrace projection, it’s not difficult.
Over the last decade too, I’ve got fed up of massed modern army camouflage uniforms on stage. Here there is too much of it, and gender-blindness does not ever aid army battle scenes. The female captain, though she was tiny, was extremely good. So was Micah Balfour as the other leading soldier.
As with Bath’s recent ‘The Tempest’ with the Ben Crystal Globe-approved affected thespian pronunciation of Milan as ‘Millun’, I was irritated extremely by the pronunciation of Marseilles as ‘Marcellus’ here. Why do they do it? Ignore Ben Crystal’s pronunciation guides. They’re nerdy. Rossilon for Rousillon doesn’t worry me because that’s the spelling in the text, nor does Malfi for Amalfi elsewhere. Neither are major internationally known places. But the text says Marseilles. So say ‘Marseilles’ rather than speculating on the pronunciation of 1606 being ‘Marcellus.’
The set was mediocre, and that’s generous. There’s a great deal of projection, but that’s a 2022 given. The lighting plot should have been fine in its design, but was inept in execution on the night with odd lights flashing on and off and shifting during a totally unrelated dialogue on stage. This was not effects. This is the RSC. I thought lights were pre-programmed nowadays. It’s a job I did for three summers. Did someone spill their coffee on the faders?
The ‘completing the canon’ issue has left the RSC stuck with three of the weakest plays out of their four originals this year (Henry VI Parts II and III, All’s Well That Ends Well). Only Richard III is in the most popular / best-known half of the canon.
Nine years – not to mention one pandemic – ago, the RSC embarked upon its loftily noble project to work its way through every play in the Shakespearean canon. There have been inevitable highs and lows, as well as a creeping sensation of weary trudge as the last few plays have been ticked off. The project is completed with this bitterly unlovely romance, but it would be a stretch to say that it ends well.
Fiona Mountford, The i, 26 August 2022
In 2013, they did enough with All’s Well That Ends Well to leave me thinking the play had been greatly under-rated. Not this time. Its inherent weaknesses as a play were clear. It’s been a year where Chichester Festival Theatre has shone so brightly, leaving the RSC very much an also-ran, but then Chichester could choose what to do, rather than fulfilling a pre-ordained list.
Overall?
Direction / production 2 star. It so fails to live up to the trailer and advance publicity. Far, far too many two person dialogues on an empty stage. The direction lacked any ‘zest.’ It desperately needed dance. I’d blame the play, but then it was SO good in 2013.
Three great actors: Paroles, King of France, Lafue all acting 5 star.
Rosie Sheehy as Helena 4 star – with a reliable and favourite 5 star actress deprived of power and movement.
Add it up with the set and costume and unspectacular supporting roles (I’m being kind, some were very weak)? I did this review before any others had appeared initially- we saw it the night after Press Night. I thought my three stars would be at the lowest end, but it appears to be the better end of the collective as more appear – they have been added with quotes.
***
THE PROGRAMME
The RSC was always the bench mark for programmes and have maintained the same format for years so they are ones to keep. I have a shelf of them. It still does the excellent brief summary and cast bios and an RSC performance history, but this one had dull academic essays. They should set the computers to eradicate words like curate, mediated and challenge, context collapse, cognitive control, and why are they in inverted commas? But then the writer is a lecturer in “Computational Sociology.”
‘What Goffman meant by this convoluted summary is that the presentation of an authentic self, whatever that might be, was rare in everyday social interaction.‘
Christopher Barrie, The programme notes
Spare me from academic writing. I want to know the director’s concept. I want to know the 1606 context (if relevant). I’d like an interview with a leading actor on how they got into the role. Marmion’s review points out:
“The programme for the new production of All’s Well That Ends Well warns us that the play is considered ‘unloved’ and even ‘unlovable.’ It’s a dispiriting starting position for an audince, many of whom will be hoping to take pleasure in the performance.”
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail, 26 August 2022
I really miss the RSC and Globe pre-shows.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
The RSC subsequent publicity noticeably fails to mention any national newspaper reviews:
4 star
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ****
Sophie Eaton, West End Best Friend ****
3 star
Dzifa Benson, Daily Telegraph ***
Clive Davis, The Times ***
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian ***
Claire Brennan, The Observer ***
The ending is one of the best parts of McIntyre’s uneven production. Helena and Bertram stand alone, silently facing one another. We are left wondering: can all really be well? As so often at the RSC, what is definitely not well is the way that many of those on stage struggle to deliver their lines: garble words, hammer rhythms, mangle meanings. This is not the actors’ fault; many lack experience and need proper training. The RSC has the resources to provide this; the question, here, is: why doesn’t it?
Claire Brennan, The Observer, 28 August 2022
Julia Rank, The Stage ***
2 star
Fiona Mountford, The i, **
“The scenes that centre upon the war and the exposing of Parolles’s myriad lies greatly outstay their welcome and skew the balance of the play, while overemphatic work from Funlola Olufunwa as the should-be sympathetic Widow who comes to Helena’s aid alienates us further. There is some dreadful verse-speaking across the company and too many passages where one senses that the audience is entirely bewildered.”
Fiona Mountford, The i, 26 August 2022
Patrick Marmion, The Daily Mail, **
“An unloved play just got unlovelier”
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail, 26 August 2022
Quentin Letts, The Sunday Times **
“Video graphics are employed, not terribly well. Thudding dance music combines with modern leisure wear and exaggerated regional accents. The soldiers are laughably bad.”
Quentin Letts, Sunday Times Culture, 28 August 2022
1 star
Nick Wayne, Pocket Size Theatre *
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
All’s Well That Ends Well RSC 2013
All’s Well That Ends Well, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2018
BLANCHE McINTYRE (director)
Bartholomew Fair, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2019
The Winter’s Tale, Globe 2018
The Norman Conquests, Ayckbourn, Chichester 2017
Titus Andronicus, RSC 2017
The Two Noble Kinsmen, RSC 2016
Noises Off, Nuffield, Southampton, 2016
As You Like It, Globe 2015
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Brighton, 2015
The Comedy of Errors, Globe 2014
The Seagull, Headlong / Nuffield 2013
ROSIE SHEEHY
Richard III, RSC 2022 (Lady Anne)
King John, RSC 2019 (King John)
The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter, Ustinov Bath 2018
Strife by John Galsworthy, Chichester 2016
JAMIE WILKES
Richard III, RSC 2022 (Buckingham)
The Rover by Aphra Behn, RSC 2016
The Two Noble Kinsmen, RSC, Swan Theatre, 2016
The Comedy of Errors, Globe 2014 (Dromio)
Titus Andronicus Globe 2014
The Shoemaker’s Holiday, RSC, 2015 (Hammon)
BENJAMIN WESTERBY
Henry VI- Rebellion (Henry VI- Part 2), RSC 2022
Henry VI- Wars of The Roses (Henry VI Part 3), RSC 2022
MICAH BALFOUR
Richard III, RSC 2022 (Hastings)
Much Ado About Nothing, RSC 2022 (Don John)
The Barber Shop Chronicles, The Roundhouse 2019
SIMON COATES
Richard III, RSC 2022 (Stanley)
Blithe Spirit, Bath 2019
Richard III, Almeida 2016 (Bishop of Ely)
King John, Globe (Philip of France)
Romeo & Juliet, Headlong (Friar Laurence)
BRUCE ALEXANDER
Measure for Measure, RSC 2012
CLAIRE BENEDICT
Richard III, RSC 2022 (Duchess of York)
OSCAR BATTERHAM
Richard III, RSC 2022
WILL EDGERTON
Richard III, RSC 2022 (Tyrell)
SOPHIE CARTMAN
Richard III, RSC 2022
THOM PETTY
Richard III, RSC 2022
Henry VI- Rebellion, RSC 2022
JOERAVER SANGHA
Richard III, RSC 2022
OLIVIA ONYEHARA
Richard III, RSC 2022
CALLUM COATES
Richard III, RSC 2022
Fallen Angels, Salisbury 2015
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