All's Well That Ends Well at the Stratford Festival – A Review
By good fortune I had the opportunity to see a production of Othello last winter at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater that was directed by Marti Maraden. I was so much struck with her intelligent, cohesive direction that I was looking forward to seeing more of her work in Stratford later in the year. I was not disappointed in All’s Well That End’s Well.
I should think that All’s Well presents even more challenges for a director than Othello, because the play itself has such serious internal problems that they can only be glossed over, never resolved. Moreover, while the story of Othello is familiar to many theater-goers, All’s Well That Ends Well is not well known, nor is its plot particularly memorable. With such a play, a director cannot take for granted that the audience will understand anything that is not clearly explained.
In key ways, the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well simply strains one’s credulity. As the story begins, Bertram (Jeff Lillico), the only son of the widow Countess of Rossillion (Martha Henry), is leaving home, summoned to join the court of the King of France (Brian Dennehy), who is dying. Among the tears shed at this parting are those of Helena (Daniela Vlaskalic), a pretty and accomplished young woman who has been living as the ward of the Countess since the recent death of her father, an eminent physician.
Helena cries because she has fallen hopelessly in love with Bertram — hopelessly, because Bertram has no interest in her and because their different stations in life make a match impossible in any case. But why should she love Bertram?
At the outset, we learn from Helena’s own mouth (in a soliloquy) that the attraction is physical, and we are confirmed in that assumption when, immediately afterward, she initiates a comic exchange with Bertram’s servant Parolles (Juan Chioran) about the merits of virginity.
But as the play unfolds, Bertram proves to be contemptible and unmanly. Pressured by the king to marry Helena (who has healed the king with a prescription inherited from her father), Bertram insults Helena and then pretends to embrace the marriage while making secret plans to escape it. Later in the play, having fled to Italy as a soldier to avoid sleeping with his bride, he seeks to seduce Diana (Leah Oster) a respectable young virgin of Florence, then, to save his own skin, defames her as a whore.
As an audience, we find Bertram thoroughly detestable. Yet knowing it all, Helena never wavers in wanting him for a husband. Living in the same house with them, how could she have failed to see his character? And seeing his flaws so shamefully exposed to the world, how could she still want him?
Helena’s steadfastness in pursuit of Bertram is inexplicable. Equally hard to believe is that everyone in the play except Bertram seems to know that his foppish friend and follower Parolles is a braggart and a coward. Bertram may be a cad, but he hardly seems a fool. Why does it take an elaborate practical joke on Parolles to convince Bertram that he has an unworthy friend?
Yet Marti Maraden’s perfectly-paced production of All’s Well That Ends Well holds together beautifully despite the play’s improbabilities. Where the Bard touches on a theme throughout the play, Maraden helps us draw the dots. For example, Helena and Parolles introduce the themes of virginity and procreation early in the play; the clown Lavache (Tom Rooney) develops them in strangely profound comic speeches; and Diana brings them full circle in a late scene.
Most of all, this is a play about our universal experience of grief, loss, and resignation, climaxed by the Countess’s lament:
My heart is heavy, and mine age is weak;
Grief would have tears, and sorrow bids me speak.
(Act III, Scene 5). It would be easy for a director to waste energy trying to make too much of the weak storyline, at the expense of the play’s poetry. Not so here.
We loved the hilarious (and almost cruel) scene in which the blindfolded Parolles is unmasked as a liar and a fraud. But this show has a number of outstanding performances. The tireless Ben Carlson (who played an energetic Hamlet later the same day that we saw All’s Well That Ends Well)brought the most out of his supporting role as the First Lord Dumaine. Fiona Reid, as the Widow Capilet, and Michelle Fisk, as Mariana, were both delightful.
And, of course, the lovely and gracious Martha Henry, the veteran Stratford actress, is perfectly cast as the Countess of Rossillion. What I will remember longest about this show, however, is the multifaceted performance of Tom Rooney as the comic philosopher Lavache.
Unfortunately, there are weak performances as well. The most disappointing was that of Daniela Vlaskalic as Helena. She declaimed her lines in an unnatural, almost sing-song manner, having failed to learn from Martha Henry how to project her voice in a large theater without sacrificing expression and meaning. The most jarring performance was that of Leah Oster, who inexplicably brought to All’s Well That Ends Well the same midwestern drawl that she apparently uses as Marian the Librarian in The Music Man, also part of the Stratford Festival’s 2008 season. And I could not help feeling that Brian Dennehy, as the King of France, was saving his energy for something else.
According to the program notes, this production of All’s Well That Ends Well (probably written around 1602) is set in 1889. As is usual with the deplorable practice of setting Shakespeare plays in different time periods, this led to distracting incongruities.
I was able to overlook the historical fact that, in 1889, it had been a hundred years since there had been a French king. But I had more difficulty with Helena and her “holy pilgrimage.” According to the text of the play (Act III, Scene 5), Helena has come to Florence in disguise, pretending to be a pilgrim to a saint’s shrine. (Her real purpose in Florence is to pursue her husband and obtain her marital rights).
Students of European social history can correct me, but it is my sense that the practice of undertaking long pilgrimages on foot to religious shrines had long since died out by 1889. And if Ms. Vlaskalic as Helena was supposed to be wearing a “pilgrim” disguise in these scenes, I did not see it. Once again, the “modern” setting served only to muddle the plot.
By Anonymous
http://ezinearticles.com/?Alls-Well-That-Ends-Well-at-the-Stratford-Festival—A-Review&id=1366782
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