This problem play completes the RSC’s 10-year project to perform and record 34 works for posterity. It is perfectly suited to its director, Blanche McIntyre, who has notched up The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure in recent years and again proves her knack for navigating the tricky plays.
At its centre is a romance in which one of Shakespeare’s women, unusually, calls the shots. Helena (Rosie Sheehy) fixes her gaze on Bertram (Benjamin Westerby) and turns the object of her obsession into a trophy husband after winning a bargain with the ailing King of France (Bruce Alexander): that she can cure him in exchange for a marriage. Bertram regards her as a “poor physician’s daughter” and a detested wifely “club” until he is tricked into submission in the play’s rather forced happy ending.
