“All’s Well That Ends Well” at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Jeremy Malies on the South Bank
26 November 2024

The substitution of one woman for another in bed, wholesale seductions, and a forced marriage. It’s hardly a savoury plotline. Add the theme of class – treated adeptly here by director Chelsea Walker – and it’s no wonder that the play (neglected for decades) is being performed more often.

Ruby Bentall as Helen.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

As the female lead (“heroine” doesn’t quite cut it given obsessive pursuit of a man who simply doesn’t like her) Ruby Bentall playing Helen is first shown drinking excessively to numb grief after the death of her court physician father. What I like about Bentall’s treatment of the role is that, alone among the Helens I’ve seen recently, she shows the character questioning her own behaviour. There is an internal debate going on. Should she really be manipulating Bertram, played by Kit Young, in this way? (The plot has her use one of her father’s prescriptions to cure the king of a mortal illness and then insist on the hand in marriage of nobleman Bertram as her reward.)

Bentall, who excelled in Our Country’s Good at the Lyric Hammersmith, is willowy and monochrome at first as though she has just stepped out of a Beardsley drawing. She impresses by mining all the soliloquies for their subtleties. By following Bertram to an Italian battlefield, Helen risks her life and Bentall communicates this well. She is propelled on such a course by overpowering love. The love does not prove fatal which is why this is a problem play not a tragedy.

Walker does a realistic job in her depiction of warfare. Some of this is down to the excellence of William Robinson as Paroles the braggart servant who becomes a lieutenant. Fight director Kev McCurdy contributes to the martial environment with an interrogation scene involving sensory deprivation. There is a clear decision that Paroles and Bertram should be depicted as sexually attracted to each other. I get it that men going into battle are often tactile (Trojan warriors would comb each other’s hair) but these fellow officers seem to be in a relationship although Bertram – judged by the warmth of his single kiss of Helen and of course the pursuit of female camp followers – is bisexual.

Bertram’s speeches as written horrify us as to the character’s objectification of women. Young calibrates this so that we do not vilify him. He progresses from a womanizer to a wounded spirit with a grudging respect for Helen’s devotion to him. Fresh from the Netflix series Shadow and Bone, Young uses all his technical prowess to show Bertram’s final contrition and scraps of dignity. It’s a subtle developmental arc.

There is ample evidence in this production as to why the piece should be classed as one of the “problem plays”. Like Measure for Measure, it uses the bed trick and Paroles tells Helen early on that as a woman, she should not expect to have any choice over which man takes her virginity! And yet this is a version of French society in which once Helen has cured the king, her demand to have the husband of her choice holds sway. Problematic indeed.

William Robinson as Paroles.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Sex and marriage are frequently shown as being disparate. Young is emphatic when conveying the fact that he won’t be cajoled into having sex with Helen: “I have wedded her, not bedded her …” He must be deceived into sleeping with Helen when he thinks he is with would-be seducee Diana, a virgin from a tavern near the battlefield. Diana is played with wit and savvy by Georgia-Mae Myers who won praise as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus on this same stage.

Costume design by Megan Rarity is neutral; she and other members of the creative team show skill in keeping the setting timeless. I guess I was missing the point by wondering what era we were in as I looked closely at sunglasses and the typography of a newspaper before concluding this was all vaguely Sixties. Rosanna Vize (who also had input with costumes) depicts the courts of Roussillon and Paris with a painted backcloth featuring winged infants in a similar style to the playhouse’s ceiling. (The backcloth is ripped during the battle – there must be a new one for every performance.)

Simon Slater’s original music focuses on soprano Angela Hicks on the balcony who often sings solfège. My seat was up close to her, and I wondered if Walker and Slater were suggesting that we are an audience at an opera watching all this. Or are the characters below being tormented by a classical goddess?

The main theme is topical in that this is an arranged marriage of sorts, being unusual in that it’s the groom who is married against his will. A line that stayed with me was Bertram’s “A poor physician’s daughter my wife?” As the countess, you can see the excellent Siobhán Redmond’s cogs whirring as she evaluates Helen as a prospective daughter-in-law. I intuited that she is taking in her beauty and chutzpah as well as acknowledging that this is the child of a respected physician. But class remains a stumbling block. Do we still choose our marriage (if not our bedroom) partners according to class? I do hope that royalty and aristocrats respect their physicians more in today’s society.

Bertram and Helen are odd, unknowing bedfellows. But there are no odd bedfellows in the team for this production. All the components gel in another first-rate project. Walker gives the text room to breathe and never warps the play out of its own guise. Impressive.