All’s Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s least performed, most puzzling plays. Doctor’s daughter Helena is hopelessly in love with Bertram, who is socially way above her. When Helena cures the King of France of a seemingly terminal illness, he grants her request: the choice of any noble youth at court for her husband. Naturally, Helena chooses Bertram. Appalled, he marries her under duress but imposes impossible terms for their physical union and then hurries abroad to war. Helena, determined to have him, follows.
Director Blanche McIntyre’s patchily thought-out production is set in the present – cue flashy social media projections that introduce a made-for-secondary-school feel and serve to highlight the improbabilities of the plot (which Shakespeare partially masked by setting the action outside Elizabethan England). The romance aspect of the play is clinically dispatched: Helena (Rosie Sheehy) is brisk and determined; Bertram (Benjamin Westerby) comes across as arrogantly entitled; there is no spark between the two.
