I have said on my occasions that William Shakespeare is my favorite author. That doesn’t mean the Bard of Avon gets a blank check from me. As much as works like Hamlet or Macbeth or The Tempest are masterpieces of drama, that doesn’t mean I like all his works. And while I do dig a number of his lesser-known plays, there are some I don’t care for much at all.
And I really don’t like All’s Well That Ends Well.
Notable cast members: For this one, there really aren’t any aside from Ian Charleson, one of the two leads from Chariots of Fire, making his second appearance in this series. He plays the male lead of Bertram here.
Trivia: All’s Well, like Measure for Measure, is a problem play, meaning it was meant to be a comedy but comes across with some…problems for modern audiences. That’s putting it mildly, as I will explain below. This production had director Elijah Moshinsky give contradictory explanations over whether or not this particular production had a happy ending or not. It’s also a very dark play when it comes to lighting since there are some serious shadows here.
The play: I really don’t like All’s Well That Ends Well. And it comes down to the play’s female lead, Helena. She’s the brilliant daughter of a deceased but also brilliant (and poor) doctor. Raised alongside young nobleman Bertram by the Countess of Rousillion, Helena as an adult has her father’s medical skills which she uses to heal the King of France from some mystery illness (and here, the cure is implied to be at least a little sexual as she and the king share a kiss before the scene fades to black). After the king is successfully healed, he offers Helena the chance to marry any man of her choice in the kingdom. All of the eligible men come through, all of them praise Helena for her grace, beauty, and intelligence…and Helena chooses Bertrum, the one man in the kingdom who has absolutely no interest in her. He marries her under duress and then leaves to go fight in the Italian wars, promising Helena he will never consummate the marriage and even, under encouragement from his flamboyant and cowardly friend Paroles, plans to bed an Italian virgin during the campaign.
Helena, for her part, decides to follow Bertram to Italy and trick him into bed in an elaborate plan, involving a bed trick and the willing participation of both the Italian virgin and the girl’s mother, lots of travel between Italy and France, faking her own death, and finally forcing a confession of love out of a beaten Bertram to end the play, only for the king to make the same offer to marry any man of her choice to the aforementioned Italian virgin, showing the king at least probably didn’t learn a damn thing.
And for the life of me, I can’t see why Helena thinks Bertram is worth that much effort. He’s an easily-manipulated clod who can’t see what a fool Paroles is until his other friends can show it for sure. Bertram’s reason for not wanting to marry Helena has nothing to do with her grace, beauty, or skill, but entirely due to her class. He thinks because she is below him, she isn’t worth anything, and yet, she thinks he is. Even when she sees him openly hitting on another woman (one who has no interest in Bertram to boot), still she pursues this man, a fellow I think of as rather worthless.
He’s just not worth all that effort. Especially not when every other man in the kingdom (save Paroles, but he’s just a weasel of a man) would gladly marry Helena for all the other qualities she has.
Now, as far as this production goes, the excessive shadows actually helps, making the production murky and dark, appropriate for a play where we’re theoretically supposed to cheer Helena on for going after a man who isn’t worth this much effort and whose declaration of love at the end can’t be sincere no matter how well he says it. As I see it, this is the best that could be done with such a problematic play, and when the BBC decided to produce the complete works of William Shakespeare, well, they didn’t to their credit decide to skip the weaker ones.
Grade: I’m just not a fan of this play as I am sure you can see from what I wrote above. C+
Next: Well, as much as I don’t like this one, the next one is actually one of my favorites even if it is another of the lesser-known works. That means next time, it’ll be The Winter’s Tale.
0 Comments