It’s a good season for heroines at Stratford this summer. To Pippa Nixon’s endearing Rosalind in As You Like It we can now add Joanna Horton’s Helena in Nancy Meckler’s revival of All’s Well That Ends Well. It is in many ways a thankless role: Helena may show inventiveness and determination in executing a classic “bed-trick” to confirm her marriage to the reluctant Bertram, but on the other hand she is wet enough in the first place to have committed herself to such a feckless young pillock. Alex Waldmann complements and contrasts his engaging Orlando in As You Like It with an almost but not quite entirely unlikable Bertram, although he and Meckler add unusual depth and complexity to the character by making him genuinely grief-stricken when he hears the false news of Helena’s death.
    
This piece is a Shakespearean rarity in that for the most part it reads better than it plays. Despite being one of the “problem plays” from later on in the Bard’s career, it is packed with the kind of dense language and wordplay that characterised his early comedies before his characters became more confidently human creations. The final-act denouement, in which the King of France is gradually driven to distraction by contradictory testimony from a young petitioner (Natalie Klamar, enjoying the mischief), is so drawn out it makes the corresponding scene in Measure For Measure look like a model of Pinterian economy. It can, in short, be a bugger to keep things viably going… especially if you’re also concerned with making it comprehensible.
    
Meckler is adept at clarity. Here, she gets Charlotte Cornwell to play the elderly Countess as warmer- and younger-feeling than her austere elderly looks, and Nicolas Tennant as the fool Lavatch manages to remain almost as perky as his Touchstone in As You Like It with, this time, even more unfunny material. Even the cowardly hypocrite Parolles (his very name means “words”) is rendered emotionally if not always linguistically understandable by Jonathan Slinger. A glass-walled enclosure upstage on Katrina Lindsay’s set serves at various times as a winter garden, an oxygen tent and a kind of general “cabinet of wonders” for climactic moments. You could see a far worse production, but also a somewhat better play.

Written for the Financial Times.