The set for the Rossillion estate had "an elegiac quality," captured in Stephen Brimson Lewis's "spare, effective design of wintry trees etched on sheets of silvery, scoured glass."126 Costumes were seventeenth-century and Judi Dench was the "winter queen."127 Kate Kellaway recalls the effect of Dench's performance:
Tears started into my eyes as she threw herself into the speech that she--or Doran--sees as pivotal to the play. It is the moment when she first learns of Helena's love for her son--lines that could just as easily have been thrown away. But Dench brings to the speech an urgency, as though her words were the last flowering of everything she had ever felt--age's passionate identification with youth: "Even so it was with me when I was young. / If ever we are nature's, these are ours: this thorn Doth rightly belong. Our blood to us, this to our blood is born."128
A note of caution was sounded, however: "She gives an authoritative performance, as one would expect, but it is Helena and Bertram who matter," and Bertram (Jamie Glover) "has no character change."129 There was universal acclaim for Claudie Blakley's performance as Helen: "she's feisty and forlorn at the same time, vulnerable when riding high, courageous in deepest misery."130 Nicholas de Jongh described how the Countess "scathingly dismisses her heir as a chronic disappointment and passionately upholds Helena as a cherishable daughter-in-law."131
The production had tilted approbation toward Helen in such a way that everything she did appeared "perfectly normal" while Bertram had nowhere to go at the end:
Glover gave a superb rendering here of an unimaginative, unreflective and largely inarticulate young man realizing too late that his attempts at achieving liberty have only betrayed him into a permanent version of exactly the "subjection" he had resented back in I.I: his performance never made the mistake of trying to make Bertram likeable, but I've never seen the young Count's situation illuminated so fully and so desolately.132
The play ended with the lights fading on Helen and Bertram "looking warily at one another, circling each other, a pace apart, in a recapitulation of the choosing scene's dance."133
Turning to the rest of the cast, there was praise for "the wonderfully accomplished" performance of Gary Waldhorn as the King of France, while "Guy Henry as Parolles is bliss: tall as a hollyhock, trailing hippy scarves from unexpected quarters of his body and glitteringly garrulous. Thank goodness that the play, like life, is sorrow and joy."134
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH GREGORY DORAN AND STEPHEN FRIED
Gregory Doran, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. His much-acclaimed 2003 production of All's Well That Ends Well discussed here featured Dame Judi Dench as the Countess of Rossillion and Guy Henry as Parolles.
Stephen Fried has a BA in history and drama from Stanford University and an MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama. He teaches acting at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and is on the directing faculty for the New School for Drama. He is the recipient of the Drama League Director's Fellowship as well as the Jacob Javitz Fellowship, and has trained at the Center for Theatre Studies in Gardzienice, Poland, and with the Double Edge Theatre troupe. He now works as a freelance director in New York after three years as resident assistant director with the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Apart from his many innovative productions of the plays of Shakespeare and other classic writers, he has also created productions of new writing with contemporary playwrights. His successful Much Ado About Nothing in 2010 for the Trinity Shakespeare Festival led to his being hailed as a contemporary "Defining director." Stephen is talking here about his 2010 All's Well That Ends Well for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which successfully cast a total of nine actors for all twenty-three parts.
There are different views as to whether this is an early Shakespeare play (perhaps revised later) or a late play; did you have any preconceptions about this and were they confirmed or confounded by your production?
Doran: I had a very precise impression of what period the play was, because it seemed to have a relationship with the Sonnets. There is something about the ambiguity of the language that reminded me in a very particular way of the Sonnets. Sometimes the language is dense and gnarled; there are times when Helen, in trying to describe her love for Bertram, describes it in a very compressed way. The Sonnets are all about compression; they keep feelings in check with language, whereas in All's Well That Ends Well feelings are released through language. That gave me a strong sense that the play would have been written around about the early 1600s. The Sonnets were first published in 1609 but clearly were written before that.
Fried: Throughout my time working on All's Well That Ends Well, I never felt that it could have been an early play. My experience with the early comedies--having directed both The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost--is that those plays radiate a youthful exuberance and naivete. You feel in the early comedies that Shakespeare identifies himself principally with his youthful protagonists. In All's Well That Ends Well, he seems to take a much more critical look at the subject of youth--he points our attention in the play's first half not only to Bertram's pride and recklessness and Parolles' self-absorption, but also to Helen's inexperience and her mistaking of obsession for mature love. The adult characters--the Countess and the King--function as the play's moral centers, and provide the play with its mature, almost Chekhovian outlook. Take, for example, the Countess's speech from Act 1 Scene 3:
Even so it was with me when I was young.
If ever we are nature's, these are ours. This thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong.
Our blood to us, this to our blood is born:
It is the show and seal of nature's truth,
Where love's strong passion is impressed in youth.
By our remembrances of days foregone,
Such were our faults, or then we thought them none.
I find it difficult to imagine that this could have been the work of a young writer. It's in passages like this one that Shakespeare seems to be identifying more with the older characters in the play, which isn't the case in the earlier plays.
In addition to this, the play's ambiguities, both in content and form, always suggested to me the work of a playwright who had grown so experienced in his craft that he was now experimenting with the comedic genre. In terms of content, the play's complicated moral questions regarding the possibility of redemption and the ability to love someone who may not deserve your love place it in close relation to the other mid-career problem plays Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. In addition to this, the blending of comedic and dramatic tones seemed to me to connect All's Well with later plays--particularly Cymbeline--and so it never really seemed possible to me that this could be an early play.
The language of All's Well That Ends Well also distances it from the early-career works. In the early plays, Shakespeare frequently seems to be showing off through bold displays of his verbal dexterity. The language in those plays feels youthful and exuberant. All's Well, on the other hand, has a more mature, subtle, and complicated feeling to it. The imagery is more delicate and nuanced. To put it simply, the play sounds so different from the early comedies, and feels much more connected in tone to the great tragedies and problem plays that Shakespeare wrote in the middle and later phases of his career.
The play seems to draw attention to the role of language with its high incidence of rhyming couplets, of proverbs and sayings, on "telling" rather than "showing" and the inclusion of a character called P
arolles; how did you cope with this emphasis on language in the play?
Doran: The language in the central scene of the first part, when Helen cures the King, has an incantatory quality. In performance there is a sense that the rhymes themselves are curing the King. There is something very deliberate about the spell and the enchantment that it evokes.
Fried: While there certainly are a great number of proverbs and rhymes in the play, in production and in terms of what the play is really about, I didn't find All's Well That Ends Well to be significantly more concerned with the role of language than any other of Shakespeare's plays. Human beings' relationship with language and words was a constant fascination of Shakespeare's, and appears as a theme in almost every play he wrote, probably most explicitly in Love's Labour's Lost.
That said, the play's emphasis on "telling" rather than "showing" is certainly one of the great challenges that it presents to a director. Many of the play's most significant events--Helen's curing of the King, her discovery that Bertram has run away, the complicated maneuvering of the rings, and of course the infamous "bed trick," all occur offstage, and we're given complicated conversational scenes such as the beginning of Act 2 Scene 3 between Lafew, Bertram, and Parolles, or the opening of Act 4 Scene 3 between the two Dumaine brothers to learn of the momentous events that have taken place out of our view. As a result, I felt it was important at certain points to delicately weave visual storytelling into places where it wasn't explicitly called for by the playwright. An example of this was the ring plot--which is one of those aspects of the play that is endlessly talked about but barely shown onstage. I felt that the audience's appreciation for the significance of these rings would benefit from seeing a bit of their traffic, and so in the first scene, as the Countess bade farewell to Bertram, she presented his father's ring to him as a sort of "going away present." In Act 2 Scene 3, the King grandly presented his ring to Helen in gratitude for her curing him. These small moments enabled the audience to follow the conversation over these rings a little more closely in the final scene, I think.
Yet I also felt that the play's emphasis on telling rather than showing was somewhat by design, and I tried not to betray this aspect of the play. The result of this focus on the aftermath of an event, I found, is that the audience's attention is pulled off of the events themselves and onto the way that the play's characters respond to them. Thus, the real "story" of the play lies in the characters' subtle shifts in outlook and behavior as they react to what's happening around them. It's this aspect of the text that I think gives the play its almost Chekhovian tone; there is frequently a sensation of distance between the characters and the events they are responding to, and so the characters are able to reveal aspects of their humanity that they wouldn't if they were right in the middle of the event. For this reason, while we did show certain things when I felt that it might improve narrative clarity without betraying the play's structural intentions (such as the ring exchanges described above), I also tried to honor the play's impulse against showing certain events. I think many directors might be tempted to stage the bed trick in the interest of narrative clarity, but it felt intentional to me that the audience not be allowed to see that. As that moment of consummation represents such a major transformation for both Helen and Bertram, it seemed somehow perfect that Shakespeare leads us right up to that scene, then suddenly takes the characters away to somewhere where we can't see exactly what they go through--where a miracle can occur--and then brings them back radically changed. Both Helen and Bertram's speech and behavior change fundamentally from Act 4 Scene 3 on--after the point in the play where the bed trick would occur. So we come to understand what has happened not by seeing the event itself, but by seeing how it has changed the human beings that were involved in it. By keeping the bed trick offstage, Shakespeare allows the event to assume a more mythic size than anything that could be shown onstage.
The absence of so many of the play's events from the stage also pulls our focus to the events that actually do occur onstage--Bertram's rejection of Helen, his decision to run away, Parolles' betrayal of Bertram, and Helen's eventual acceptance of him following his pleas of "pardon." These are the events that really delineate that play's most significant journey--the evolution of the relationships between Helen, Bertram, and Parolles--and this journey becomes so much clearer because so many of the other events occur outside of our view.
In terms of how all of this affected our production, I think it was this emphasis on human behavior that led me to take a decidedly Chekhovian approach to the production. The autumn became a major reference point in terms of the physical world, and it was important to me that the play finish in a sort of "magical fall," which captured not only the play's particular pensiveness and its emphasis on time and age, but also its capacity for miraculous redemption. The actors' work also focused on the exploration of those fine details and nuances of human behavior that we frequently associate with Chekhov. All of this, I believe, stems in some degree from the play's emphasis on language, and its tendency to talk about an event rather than to show it directly.
Shakespeare often yokes together seemingly incompatible plot elements; is All's Well a radical play about the removal of class barriers and a woman's right to choose her partner, or a fairy tale with its roots in folklore, or something between the two?
Doran: It's a bittersweet play, a sort of realistic fairy tale. It has fairytale elements, but I think you have to root it in reality. We didn't heighten the sense of fairy tale. I took a rather historicist point of view about the play, again in relationship to the Sonnets. It seemed to me that you could quite easily connect Bertram to either the Earl of Pembroke or Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, two of Shakespeare's patrons, both of whom, like Bertram, had refused marriages to women who they thought were not right for them. I was also fascinated by the possibility that Shakespeare and the King's Men, in order to avoid the plague in 1603, had come to Wilton House, where Mary Pembroke, Sidney's sister, ran this sort of Academy and patronized many poets, writers, and scientists. This was the world of the Countess of Rossillion. We were therefore quite specific and set our production absolutely in 1603/1604.
It's a Blackfriars play rather than a Globe play. It has a concentration of thought and an ambiguity of character which is interesting. From one point of view, Helen is a stalker: she wants her man and she stalks him all the way to Paris and he finds himself stuck with marrying her. That's not the basis for a great relationship, is it? On the other hand, she recognizes something profound about her love for him.
We were interested in the class element in the Sonnets, where the poet is devoted to the young man who is way beyond him in terms of social standing. Shakespeare was just an ordinary boy from Warwickshire, and perhaps in the portrait of Helen there was something autobiographical. Also in Parolles--from the French word parole: what better way for Shakespeare to disguise himself than to call himself "words"? Parolles is a spectacular wordsmith. He is also a pompous braggart, but he learns something very precise about living life.
Fried: I think it's something between the two. When I first encountered All's Well That Ends Well, what initially appealed to me was the way that it begins very much like a fairy tale, but that as the young characters go out into the world and actually experience life, the fairy tale breaks down. Shakespeare pushes the story beyond its fairytale roots into a far more complicated exploration of human behavior, and also of the flaws in each of us and in the world we live in.
That said, I don't think that the play ever really becomes so direct as to be called "a radical play about the removal of class barriers and a woman's right to choose her partner." Helen's "right" to choose Bertram isn't really the central question of the play--as the Countess gives Helen her blessing in the play's third scene, and the King sanctions the union three scenes after that. While class barriers certainly play a huge role in the play, I think Shakespeare is trying to get at something even deeper and more universal, and the barriers bet
ween Helen and Bertram are simply a device Shakespeare uses to get at the idea of an "impossible dream." He seems to be asking, "What do you do when you achieve your dream and it turns out to be something less perfect than you imagined it to be?" Is the thing you have always aspired toward worth pursuing if it reveals itself to be flawed? In this way, Shakespeare seems to be interrogating the idea of a fairy tale quite brilliantly. The world will never live up to our happily-ever-after aspirations, he seems to be saying, so how should we cope with the inevitable disappointments of human existence? In this way, the play's tone becomes almost Shavian: an idealistic and somewhat naive heroine pursues a goal obsessively, only to discover that that goal isn't all that she thought it would be, and as a result, she's forced to mature and develop a more nuanced and pragmatic worldview.
It has been suggested that All's Well is the "lost" Shakespeare play, Love's Labour's Won; did you give any credence to this theory and did your production glance at the idea at all?
Doran: No. I know what Love's Labour's Won is, I am absolutely certain of it: it's Much Ado About Nothing. When I did Love's Labour's Lost with David Tennant and Nina Sosanya, the relationship between Rosaline and Berowne is left at the end with the imposition of one year in which they have to be apart from each other. Berowne has to go and tend the sick. So as the relationship ends you don't know when or whether these people are going to get back together.
At the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing Beatrice and Benedick have this past history. They have been wounded. Maybe he didn't come back after the year apart, or she believed his promises but he didn't quite live up to them. But he's still a wit and the relationship between Rosaline and Berowne transmogrifies into Benedick and Beatrice. So I am sure that All's Well That Ends Well is not Love's Labour's Won, but Much Ado About Nothing is. It never occurred to us that this had any relationship to Love's Labour's Won, because ultimately the love's labors aren't won.