ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL To 1 October.

London.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
by William Shakespeare.

Olivier Theatre In rep to 1 October 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30om Mat various days 2pm except Sun 2.30pm.
Runs 3hr One interval.

TICKETS 020 7452 3000.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/tickets
Review: Carole Woddis 28 May.

All’s very well throughout.
At last a Shakespeare production that sings and takes flight. It’s not often these days a director creates a concept and then delivers it in clear and dulcet tones. But that is precisely what Marianne Elliott has done with Shakespeare’s supposed `problem play’, the late `dark comedy’ that sits between Troilus and Cressida and Othello and prefigures Measure for Measure.

There is much here reminiscent of the even darker Measure – notably the `bed-trick’ by which the anti-hero is unmasked.

All’s Well hovers, as in so many Shakespeare plays, between the retributative, the loosely comic and the frankly implausible. Lessons are learnt along the way. Elliott’s key stroke is to align all these factors within the atmosphere of a fairy-tale. So in Rae Smith’s inspired costumes and setting we have castles in the air, blinking owls and silhouetted figures as if illustrated from some Victorian children’s book.

Elliott is clever enough though not to overdo it. These characters have a larger than life quality but they also have an emotional truth, nowhere more so than in Michelle Terry’s lovely, resourceful heroine Helena who some have described as unscrupulous in the ends she will go to obtain the object of her affections, Bertram, the young, hot-headed nobleman.

But here George Rainsford manages to make something human even out of this unsympathetic character (he is being engineered into an enforced marriage, the tables turned for once in the gender stakes on women, who usually find themselves having to submit to patriarchal demands).

Clare Higgins’s passionate and warm Countess of Rossillion and Oliver Ford Davies as the disease-riddled but humane King of France also provide portraits defined by real emotion.

But this is a production cast in depth at every turn. Conleth Hill’s Parolles, for once, is not just an empty braggart but carries deeper Falstaffian echoes. Adam Cork’s music, too, adds just the right gentle, lyric romanticism. Banners flutter, soldiers preen, Italian girls giggle and at the end, Helena and Bertram, at last mutually betrothed gaze into the distance, smiles turning to quizzical frowns. Doubt rightly lingers. Will all really be well?

Countess of Rossillion: Clare Higgins.
Bertram: George Rainsford.
Helena: Michelle Terry.
Parolles: Conleth Hill.
Rynaldo: Michael Mears.
Lavatch: Brendan O’Hea.
King of France: Oliver Ford Davies.
Lord Lafew: Michael Thomas.
First Lord Dumaine: Elliot Levey.
Second Lord Dumaine: Tony Jayawardena.
Gentleman Astringer: Jolyon Coy.
1st Soldier (Interpreter): Robert Hastie.
Widow: Janet Henfrey.
Diana: Hasina Haque.
Mariana: Sioned Jones.
Violenta/Isbel/Maudlin: Cassie Atkinson.
Lords, Attendants, Soldiers and Citizens: Ben Allen, Rob Delaney, Alex Felton, Tom Padley, Oliver Wilson.

Director: Marianne Elliott.
Designer: Rae Smith.
Lighting: Peter Mumford.
Sound: Ian Dickinson.
Music: Adam Cork.
Projections: Germma Carrington, Jon Driscoll.
Movement: Laïla Diallo.
Company voice work: Jeannette Nelson.
Animation: Samuel Wyer.
Assistant animator: Shaun Clark.
Textual Adviser: Samuel Adamson.

2009-05-31 17:14:52