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- Title: All’s Well That Ends Well
- Written by: William Shakespeare
- Director: Scott Wentworth
- Actors: Jessica B. Hill, Seana McKenna, Rylan Wilkie
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Tom Patterson Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs to October 29, 2022
- COVID-19 measures: Reduced capacity performance available
All’s Well That Ends Well is another way of saying that the end justifies the means.
It’s a Machiavellian mantra that directors tend to challenge in subtle, or unsubtle ways, in productions of Shakespeare’s strange comedy of that name. Scott Wentworth’s sombre and sentimental Edwardian-era production now on stage at the Stratford Festival’s new Tom Patterson Theatre, on the other hand, embraces it more throughly than any other I have seen.
Helen, the heroine who is here played as a sensitive, dewy-eyed soul by Jessica B. Hill, is the daughter of a deceased doctor, adopted by the rich Countess of Rossillion (Seana McKenna). She is smitten with the Countess’s son, Bertram (Jordin Hall), and rather than simply expressing her love to this young man she sees as above her station (and who’s practically her brother), comes up with an elaborate scheme to make him marry her.
She cures the King of France (Ben Carlson) from a seemingly terminal illness with one of her father’s old potions – her negotiated price for the treatment being that the monarch will let her choose her own husband.
When Bertram, understandably, balks at the subsequent marriage forced upon him and runs away to a war in Florence, Helen devises even more devious tricks to get him back – ones that show she has no ethical boundaries whatsoever. Indeed, she can, at times, make The Taming of the Shrew’s Petruchio seem like a gentleman caller.
And yet, Helen is regularly described as virtuous by all the characters who aren’t Bertram or his vain, boastful and, here, queer-coded pal Parolles (Rylan Wilkie). This is the play’s paradox.
Doth the Countess protest too much when she calls Helen “the most virtuous gentlewoman that ever nature had praise for creating”? Wentworth appears to take her judgement of Helen’s character at face value, making for a production that increasingly seems to take place in a world of upside-down morality – especially since Hall gives an unusually restrained portrait of Bertram, making him seem neither brattish, nor much of a bad boy in need of correction.
That sense of an inversion of ethics extends too to the cruel but funny plot line involving Parolles – a braggart who is eventually exposed as a traitorous coward when his fed-up fellow soldiers tackle him in Florence and, speaking gibberish, make him think he has been captured by the enemy.
Wilkie affects stereotypical gay mannerisms to play the part of Parolles up to this point, but drops them (and the more flamboyant parts of his costume) after this prank – which involves a little light torture and fearing for his life. He seems, literally, scared straight – and this production portrays the man as all the better for this conversion therapy.
Perhaps this was Shakespeare’s original idea: After all, it fits in with many of the controversial “conversions” that take place near the conclusion of other problem(atic) plays classified as comedies, such as The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew.
But while Wentworth’s productions of Shakespeare’s plays often sweep away assumptions about them and make audiences confront their reality, that doesn’t always mean you leave liking them more.
He is no doubt an accomplished director who knows how to create a consistent tone – in this case earnest, depressive and repressively realistic, without a hint of the magic or irony that can enliven an All’s Well – and get a company of actors to unite and deliver it.
And there are performances that work well within his vision of the play, notably McKenna’s charming Countess, and André Sills’s fresh take on the fool Lavatch, equal parts dangerous and delightful – and the only character on stage who seems to have an actual sex drive.
But while Hill delivers a lovely, fluttering-heart portrait of Helen, I found it hard to understand how this character that nearly faints from a kiss in one scene could later secretly sneak into another woman’s bed to have sex with a man while he believes she’s someone else.
I likewise found it hard to buy into the design when it eventually erupts into First World War imagery, with injured men in shrapnel helmets paraded across the stage. It’s manipulative to ask audience members to transfer our horror at the carnage of that actual war onto this play and its mercenary military adventurism.
In the early 20th century, All’s Well That Ends Well was not a popular play; it had a bit of a reputation of being unstageable. It’s often said Stratford played a major role in reversing that perception, with a production during its inaugural season in 1953.
Wentworth’s take, so confident and seemingly following the lead of the text and yet nevertheless being unsatisfying – especially in the cognitive dissonance of its unhappy happy endings for Parolles and Bertram (and Helen) – threatens to do the opposite and restore the play to obscurity.
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