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 her, and she sees it through with a zealot’s passion. Young’s Bertram is a sleazy douchebag, but we are allowed to feel for him a little – the look of panic on his face as the King blithely marries him off is nothing if not relatable. The fact that here he’s explicitly having a clandestine relationship with his male friend Parolles also adds a slightly different light to his not wanting to get married (although the events of the second half suggests he’s simply an all-opportunities horndog).
Perhaps the key to why it works is that Walker elicits thoroughly modern performances out of her cast: it’s funny because the characters are all constantly bewildered by the bizarre turns of Shakespeare’s plot, they’re like modern day young people who’ve been dropped into a world where the King can just declare who marries who. There’s a temptation with this play to get into the weeds over gender and what Helen’s struggles say about the way women are treated by men more generally. But Walker isn’t interested in all that – in the interests of comedy it’s ultimately funnier that Helen simply really wants to marry Bertram for reasons that are never really articulated.
It‘s also some of the crispest, most lucid verse speaking I’ve ever come across in a Shakespeare play, and furthermore it’s incredibly zippy, with each half coming in at slightly under an hour.
There are things that don’t quite work: certainly it would all click together a bit more satisfyingly if Helen had more to actually do in the second half. But it’s so much fun it’s hard to nitpick. People have spent centuries fretting over the right tone for All’s Well That Ends Well, but Walker makes it look effortless.
