Here’s a rare chance to see Shakespeare’s early “problem” play slimmed down and sped up into a brisk, brutal comedy about toxic masculinity set in mid-20th century France and Italy. Chelsea Walker’s production features a spirited, knowing performance from Ruby Bentall as the resourceful heroine Helen (changed from the original ‘Helena’ for some reason), that just about makes credible the character’s devotion to the awful Bertram.
Like many previous directors, Walker detects a glaring gay subtext in Bertram’s decision to leave his arranged marriage to Helen unconsummated and go off to war with his preening friend Paroles (William Robinson). Kit Young’s Bertram has looks and swag, but he’s also clearly a sociopath, equally dangerous to men and women.
This is not a subtle interpretation of the play, but it is a coherent one that gives us the chance to savour some of Shakespeare’s lesser-known and less-pleasant poetry. A seam of elegant, sensual disgust runs through All’s Well, akin to Measure for Measure (with which it shares the improbable device of the “bed-swap”, a man tricked into sleeping with the “right” woman).
“He fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour,” is how one character describes Bertram’s apparent conquest of the virgin Diana (Georgia-Mae Myers). “This woman’s an easy glove… she goes on and off at pleasure,” is the elderly Lord Lafew’s explicit double entendre about Diana’s riddling account of her apparent defloration.
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The streamlining of the text emphasises the institutional misogyny of this world. “Take her away, I do not like her now,” the King of France says, abruptly tiring of Diana’s testimony. But Walker also has Lafew urinating over the funeral flowers of the supposedly deceased Helen, and gives the humiliation of Paroles an overt sexual dimension.
This would all be pretty bleak if Bentall’s performance weren’t so nicely nuanced, inhabiting but also impishly critiquing Helen. We first see her in histrionic tears, apparently because of her dead father but really because Bertram is going away. She’s smart enough to cure the King of a fistula, daft enough not to realise Bertram is pure poison.
Whatever: this low-born autodidact plows on, inventing schemes and tricks, donning a nun’s habit and adding a slash of red lipstick, implacable in her trust in a happy ending. She clearly believes the order of marriage is a prophecy: aisle, altar, hymn.
Young’s Bertram and Robinson’s twitchy Paroles are perfectly able characterisations but broad by comparison. Siobhan Redmon plays the Countess, Bertram’s mother, with the declamatory imperiousness of an earlier age. Soprano Angela Hicks pipes randomly between scenes and the candlelighting – this venue’s USP, so good for suggesting nuance and shadow – remains unchanged throughout.
This is not an All’s Well for the ages, then. But it is a lively and delightfully succinct version, that gives us a change to savour the play’s pleasures as well as its problems.
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, to Jan 4; shakespearesglobe.com
