All’s Well That Ends Well
William Shakespeare wrote All’s Well That Ends Well as a comedy. But his play about a young woman who goes to psychotic lengths to secure the hand in marriage of a man who essentially hates her is such a hot moral mess by contemporary standards that directors tend to play it straight, often focusing on its misogyny and depiction of a brutally transactional society.
Director Chelsea Walker couldn’t be clearer, however – by hook or by crook she’s going to make All’s Well That Ends Well into a funny comedy, no matter how outlandish that makes the characters.
In this she is aided enormously by a tremendous lead performance from Ruby Bentall as protagonist Helen. Staged on a striking set by Rosanna Vize that looks kind of like an Italian fashion house, the modern-dress production begins with Bentall ugly crying at what we initially take to be sorrow at her father’s recent death. In fact, they’re tears of self-pity over her lack of any chance with Kit Young’s caddish nobleman Bertram – she’s just too low born. But her prospects change abruptly when she cures the ailing King of France with some drugs that belonged to her physician father, leading to the monarch magnanimously saying she can marry any man she wants – no need to guess who she goes for.
There’s a touch of Fleabag in how deftly Walker mines the awfulness of everyone’s situation. Bentall is superb precisely because we don’t feel sorry for her – she is a woman on a ridiculous mission to marry somebody entirely unsuited to
