All's Well That Ends Well

It must be summer because I've been to the theatre. As previewed at the weekend, it was to see All's Well That Ends Well at the National Theatre.

Some very positive comments to make. First, the design and the staging were great. Rhoda Koenig in the Independent curiously attacked these as if they were some kind of dressing-up, to disguise the difficulties of the play. In fact the use of costumes and imagery from different eras, and the pervasive use of fairy-tale motifs is inherent to the reading of the play: you can't take it as realist in any sense. Helena, the central character, is sometimes Cinderella, sometimes Red Riding-hood, sometimes Patient Griselda. The play, in this production, can be seen as a meditation on the various roles women can take in the world.

Other positives: a lot of the jokes worked. The character of Parolles really fitted in well, despite some over-playing, as a foil to the story of Bertram. His character reminded me of Lucio in Measure for Measure - clearly immoral but with important lessons to impart, and a joie de vivre to be envied. Some very good acting in some minor roles. Good music.

Any negatives, I think, stem from the fact that the play can't really work these days. The main reason, as I suggested earlier, is the character of Bertram. In this production his callowness is emphasised, but that only adds to the mystery of why Helena should fancy him. The Parolles subplot fatally undermines any moral standing he has. Even in the final scene, he lies and lies and lies until he can't get away with it any more. The King forgives him. As in a lot of late Shakespeare there's a clear longing for reconciliation, but it isn't worked through. The text doesn't provide any justification for it, and this production can't. In earlier times, perhaps Bertram's reported military achievements would earn respect. But that doesn't work nowadays. Instead, as Billington says, the closing tableaux reflect an air of perplexity: what the hell's just happened? That may be the only reaction we can have to this play these days.

Hooray for Saturday night telly!

My twitter bio reads "part snob, part thug: snug" and last night the snob won. Christ, saturday night telly is rubbish, innit? A new show, hosted by Graham Norton, might revive the variety format, but with guests like Lionel Richie and Boyzone, it's hardly cutting-edge. So, telly off, I read All's Well That Ends Well, which I'm going to see on Tuesday at the Nash.

It's a very rarely performed play, and I'm not sure I've ever read it before. Now that I have, I can understand why it's rarely put on. First, the language is strange: very dense and repetitive. Then there's an unfortunate amount of clowning, with the usual jokes about venereal diseases. Above all, though, when I finished the play, my first thought was "Well, that was morally repugnant."

The central character, Helena, cures the King of France's illness. In return, he gives her the young Count Bertram in marriage. He snobbishly rejects her, going through the ceremony but refusing to have sex with her. Later, she gets the chance to trick him into her bed, and at the end of the play, reveals the deception to him and he accepts her.

According to wikipedia "Victorian objections centred on the character of Helena, who was variously deemed predatory, immodest and both 'really despicable' and a 'doormat'". To get all valley girl on their ass, HELLO? Helena strikes me as a brilliant character, out to get what's due to her. And obviously far too good for Bertram, who is, to get all cockney boy on his arse, a total dickwad. So the ending, with its implied "so that's all right then", is shocking.

I'm impatient, now, to find out how the Nash production covers this. Michael Billington in the Guardian gives four stars but hardly covers this reversal. He says:

even though hero and heroine are finally united, there is a look of aghast bewilderment as they pose for the cameras.

The Times review by John Peter gives five big stars and says:

The ending, like a court scene, presided over by Oliver Ford Davies’s wise, grumpy King, leaves you with a magisterial and cunning ambiguity, a sense of the brooding openness of life, of which Shakespeare is such a master.

Which is really O Level standard analysis.
(Rhoda Koenig in the Independent, by the way, hated the production so much she barely comments on the interpretation.)

So, an evening to look forward to. And staying in snob mode, I then watched BBC2's Arena programme on T S Eliot. And realised that as snobs go, I am not fit to wipe his monocle.

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