All's Well That Ends Well
A Comedy by William Shakespeare
Dame Judi as Countess of Rossillion, mother of Bertram
Last Updated:  January 15, 2006
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Thanks to Diane P, UK, for sending these to me
 

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 

Reviewed by Michael Coveney in “The Daily Mail”                            

Dame Judi Dench, 69 years young on Tuesday, returned to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford last night after an absence of 14 years.  It was a disaster! (Only kidding). 

She was, of course, received with rapture as the Countess of Rossi lion, bathed in a sheen of melancholy beauty in Gregory Doran’s outstanding production. 

The Countess is a fairly small role, but pivotal in its dignified serenity.  Dame Judi has its measure exactly.  Her protégé Helena, a poor physician’s daughter, is in love with her son, the stand-offish officer Bertram. 

For curing the King of a fistula, Helena (brilliantly played by Claudie Blakley) can choose a husband from what the head courtier Lafeu (Charles Kay) describes as “this youthful parcel of noble bachelors”. 

She chooses Bertram and follows him to the Italian wars where she beds him, despite his disdain, by pretending to be another girl.  Doran’s production – which will come to the West End in February for a ten-week season – is somewhere poised between the filmic relocation to the Crimean War by Trevor Nunn (Peggy Ashcroft in her last stage appearance as the Countess and the brutal lucidity of Peter Hall’s version here in the Swan ten years ago.  

It has the best of both those worlds.  And it emphasises the pairing of Countess and daughter-in-law in tandem with that of the ‘bed-trick’ substitute and her mother (strong performances from Shelly Conn and Jane Maud).  Two of Shakespeare’s finest comic characters, the braggart Parolles and the clown Lavache, are played with great originality, into their very skin crevices, by Guy Henry and Mark Lambert. 

The exposure of the disloyal Parolles on the battlefield is as painful as the slow tracking of Jamie Glover’s cocksure, cold yet strangely sympathetic Bertram. 

All’s Well is not easy. But it has lovely verse, surprising situations, and a subtle power that makes it one of the Bard’s most insinuating, fascinating plays. 

And Dame Judi is the cherry on the cake, glowing like a beacon of hope at the company she has served so gloriously for three decades.
 

Thanks to Sandra P, UK, for sending this Review

15th December 2003 - What's on Stage Review

All's Well That Ends Well (RSC)
 

Was it worth the wait? Twenty-four years after she last trod the boards at Stratford, Dame Judi Dench is back at the scene of former theatrical glory, in the role of the Countess of Rossillion.
I have never seen an audience so expectant at an actor's arrival, nor hang so on their opening words. But then there is nothing like
a dame; this dame anyhow.

It's difficult to analyse what Dench does exactly, but she does it wonderfully well. That she is the still, beating heart of this uneven play is without question. She speaks beautifully, of course, with complete authority. She does not appear to do very much but, in
the key scene with Helena, her gentlewoman, in which she forces her to confess her love for her son, she wrings our heart.

All's Well That End's Well is not a play that's performed often and it's one that is not without its critics. Like the other 'problem' play, Measure for Measure, with which it is often bracketed, some of its central characters are very hard to warm to. That we are so involved in this production is a tribute to the talent of director Gregory Doran and a terrific cast from whom he elicits first-rate performances.

Helena (a fine, moving performance by Claudie Blakley) railroads the Countess of Rossillion's son Bertram (the effortlessly dashing Jamie Glover) into marriage after curing the King of France of a seemingly terminal illness. Bertram, who is a cold fish and proud with it, not unreasonably chafes at this and runs off to fight in the Italian wars, vowing in a letter to her that he will only be her husband if she becomes pregnant by him and gets his ancestral ring off him.

She does this by making out she is dead, following him to Italy and substituting herself in the bed of a woman towards whom he has dishonourable intentions. In a subsequent interrogation by the King of France, Bertram evades, dissembles, but then, when it's revealed that his wife is actually alive, weeps and confesses his love for her. The final scene, in which the two stand, apart, as the lights go down, suggests that there is some ambiguity about the play's title.

The costumes, by Deidre Clancy, updated here to the 17th century, are gorgeous - black giving way to a warm melange of colour in Florence - as is Paul Pyant's lighting. Among an outstanding cast, Gary Waldhorn is especially fine as the French king, Charles Kay as Lord Lefu, while Guy Henry as Parolles, the disreputable follower of Bertram, is very funny.

- Pete Wood

Thanks to Lisa S. from the UK for sharing this

All's Well that Ends Well

Financial Times By Alastair Macaulay

December 15 2003 4:00 |

Judi Dench, returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company after 13 years, makes her debut at Stratford-upon-Avon's Swan Theatre in what is one of the definitive Shakespeare productions of recent years. The director is Gregory Doran: this All's Well shows him to be one of the supreme Shakespearian directors of our era, crowning a sequence in recent years that has included his RSC accounts of Macbeth, King John, The Taming of the Shrew. Every performance is excellent, Stephen Brimson Lewis's set and Deirdre Clancy's costumes beautifully evoke the countryside and court of France of the early 17th century, but everything seems only to yield up Shakespeare's play. We're not only caught in a heartbreaking story and among exceptional characters, we also seem from first to last to be right inside the human heart. Dench has pared her acting to sheerest essence. A tiny shift of vocal emphasis takes her from severe to wry; a turn of the head changes everything; the simple maternal embraces with which she holds Helena, the central character, become the play's emotional centres. The stillness and simplicity of her performance are heartstopping. The beauty of Claudie Blakley's performance as Helena is that she's feisty and forlorn at the same time, vulnerable when riding high, courageous in deepest misery. Jamie Glover's Bertram is both the perfect head-boy to justify Helena's ardour and the callous brat to break her heart. The greatest performance after Dench's is that of Guy Henry, that superlative character actor and comic stylist, as Parolles: debonair in his blackest treachery, sunny in his worst setback, absurd in his casual conversational exchanges. Parolles is the moral negative to Helena's positive, and yet he is just as amiable, as complex, as intensely human, as she. Each character grows as we observe them in context of others. The Countess hails Helena as her daughter; but also she recognises in Helena's passionate love her own younger self. "Even so it was with me when I was young," she says; and Dench, mainly so quiet and calm, proclaims this heroically, almost tragically. Helena, her younger self, will suffer more than she gains.

The Times (London)

December 13, 2003, Saturday

Dame, set and match to Judi Dench

by:  Benedict Nightingale

IN A fit of unaccustomed sentimentality, customary perversity, or both, Shaw wrote that Shakespeare's Countess of Rossillion, who glides through All's Well like an elegantly ageing swan, was "the most beautiful old woman's part ever written". And though the play is seldom performed, the character has attracted the RSC's finest: Peggy Ashcroft, Barbara Jefford, and now Judi Dench, returning to a company in mortal need of her talent.

And, yes, it's a lovely performance: wise, warm, generous, tough, forgiving, grieving at times, yet always oddly serene. If Dame Judi can find all that in the Countess, maybe Shaw was right. Yet there's something about the Countess, and All's Well itself, that discomforts audiences. Maybe that's why it's often categorised as a "problem play". All's well, and all's not quite well.

The Countess's "gentlewoman" Helena cures the French king of a fistula that, as Gary Waldhorn plays the part, has reduced him to a moaning shade. So he gives her the reward she requests, which is the hand of Rossillion's son, Bertram. The trouble is that the boy doesn't want her and only agrees to the marriage because he's threatened with royal nemesis. When he deserts his wife for the French army, everyone thinks he's behaved badly, including his mother, who seems more of a parent to Helena than to him.

If some upper-crust valetudinarian in Casualty forced her son to wed a nurse or paramedic, we'd hope she'd end up in a straitjacket. But maybe I wouldn't have felt that way at the Swan if Jamie Glover's Bertram were more the snobbish pup others think him. Here, the character seems a decent youth keen to make his own way in the world. Glover plays Bertram from Bertram's point of view - and we sympathise with him perhaps more than we should.

The confusion is increased by Claudie Blakley's Helena, who is gawkily sweet but not the irresistible beauty everyone claims, and by Guy Henry's Parolles, the fellow-officer who misleads Bertram rather as Falstaff does Prince Hal. Henry isn't at all the braggart soldier of theatrical tradition, but an insecure, forlornly self-knowing figure who acquires a little belated dignity when his pretensions are exposed and his cowardice punished.

Again, these are good, intelligent performances but they complicate our sympathies more than the preposterously romantic plot demands. Myself, I'll remember Gregory Doran's lucid, sensitive production mainly for Dame Judi. Towards the end she sees Helena, whom she'd thought dead. All she does is thrust out her palms a little.

How many actresses could do virtually nothing - and radiate such welcome and love?

Coventry Evening Telegraph
December 12, 2003, Friday

ALL'S WELL FOR JUDI

by:  MARION MCMULLEN

HIGH-CLASS DAME: Judi Dench as Countess Rossillion in All's Well That Ends Well at the Swan Theatre in Stratford

TOP ROLES: Dame Judi Dench is back on familiar ground in Stratford and in previous roles as Portia in the Merchant of Venice, Viola in 12th Night and as the Duchess of Malfi

SHE'S played so many queens that you almost feel like curtseying when first meeting Dame Judi Dench.

After all, she's been Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown, Elizabeth I in Shakespeare In Love and Cleopatra on stage. She's also been 007's boss M in the James Bond films and the voice of the ballet mistress in children's animation series Angelina Ballerina.

She's putting her crown away at the moment and coming down a notch or two on the aristocrat scale to play the Countess Rossillion in All's Well That Ends Well at the Swan Theatre in Stratford.

"I had never seen the play and had never heard it read," says Judi. "It's a new story to me and to most people who come to the theatre to see it. They don't know the ending."

So how come one of Britain's best-loved acting stars is back on the Stratford stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company after an absence of more than 20 years?

Director Gregory Doran explains: "I'd had a conversation with Judi a while back and she said she had never played the Swan Theatre except for a recital. So I sent her a card saying 'All's Well That Ends Well, Countess Rossillion, this autumn, me directing, how about it?' and she wrote back 'The Swan, Countess Rossillion, this autumn, available, yes'.

Judi describes the arrival of Greg's card as "fortuitous". She says: "It was the same funny feeling you get at the back of your neck when you get a crossword clue right."

Stratford certainly holds a lot of precious memories for Judi. She first met her husband, actor Michael Williams, working at the RSC and the couple made their home in Charlecote for 12 years after they were married. Michael is now buried in Stratford.

She says her daughter Finty encouraged her to return because she has so many happy memories of the area.

"It's a big thing as nearly my entire past has been at Stratford. Some of the happiest times I've ever had in my career have been here. I have many old friends and family to see and I feel it's very much part of me.

"It was my daughter who told me I should go back. It's where she grew up and that's where my grandson should also have a chance to understand a bit about his past.

"Lots of things have changed," she says. "Back in 1961 the Swan Theatre was the conference room where we did rehearsals.

"The Dirty Duck pub was all made up of tiny rooms filled with old men."

Judi laughs: "It could have been Falstaff and his friends for all I know. There was one room that had a big dart board. It was so big there was no room for anything else.

"There's not a step of Stratford that hasn't got an association for me, terrific memories. I'm trying to get used to new things now. There used to be a lovely chemist shop in the town, but now it's a Car Phone Warehouse, but you can still make out the old shop name above it."

The actress, who celebrated her 69th birthday this week, first appeared with the RSC back in 1961 when she appeared as Anya in The Cherry Orchard. Over the years she has played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth and the title role in The Duchess of Malfi. She even appeared as a fieldmouse and Mama Rabbit in Toad of Toad Hall in 1972.

The last time she appeared in Stratford was in the RSC's 1979 production of Cymbeline and excited youngsters have already been turning up at the stage door to meet her after performances.

Meanwhile, Gregory Doran is talking about the play and its stalking undertones. Suddenly Judi roars with laughter. "Did you just say Play Misty For Me?" she asks. A nod from Greg sets her laughing out loud again. Yes, there's no doubt Judi Dench is back.

 

Birmingham Post
December 12, 2003, Friday

DAME JUDI IN UNFORGETTABLE STYLE

by:  RICHARD EDMONDS

Judi Dench returns to the RSC in All's Well That Ends Well

All's Well That Ends Well Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
With its lengthy passages devoted to unexplored moral concepts and its contrasts between inherent social status and plebeian virtue, All's Well That Ends Well is not a play people leap towards with glad cries, which may explain its rarity value in today's theatre.

Yet, in Greg Doran's attractive production light falls in places where you might least expect it to while the dead areas of the play received the breath of life, and seem newly minted.

The story turns on the plight of Helena (an even, unexciting performance from Claudie Blakley) the daughter of a poor court physician. Her veiled love for Bertram, son of the Countess of Rossillion leads her into collision with someone too arrogant to acknowledge her tenderness and only conscious of her lowly position.

The plot contains a bed-trick in the manner of Measure For Measure. Rings are also exchanged in ways which recall The Merchant of Venice, and much hinges upon these devices.

Still, Helena comes out of it with Bertram as her reluctant husband and she is finally made pregnant by him so, in a way, all's well that ends well.

But does it? Set in shimmering sheets of silvery metal, which can suggest autumnal forest and moonlight, the final and extremely poignant moments of the play leave Bertram and Helena facing each other in silence and without a final kiss. She has proved herself a gifted physician by curing the sick King of France. Royal gratitude has awarded her Bertram as her prize in thanks. But suddenly it becomes a clear case of physician heal thyself, thus, we are left wondering if the psychological scars Bertram has inflicted upon this sensitive girl will ever be healed. This is astonishing theatrical reality of the kind we might expect centuries later from Chekhov - to discover it in this context is mildly overwhelming.

Jamie Glover's Bertram is an appealing mix of teenage arrogance, petulance and selfishness.

But there is Judi Dench who, as the ageing and widowed Countess of Rosillion and Bertram's grieving mother is the great draw of the season, surrounded, it must be said immediately by extremely competent actors.

Here, we see a woman transformed by suffering and living out her time in an autumnal court, a woman who alone perceives Helena's finer qualities which redeem her lowly status.

Dame Judi's lonely figure reading her wayward son's letter in the half-light, reminded me of pictures I have seen of the great Ellen Terry in the role. The Gods of the theatre look after those who serve them well - the dame is completely unforgettable.
 

All's Well That Ends Well Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon Michael Billington Friday December 12, 2003 The Guardian It is 24 years since Judi Dench last appeared on a Stratford stage. But, while it is a joy to see her back, she is simply one of the jewels in the crown of Gregory Doran's exquisite production of this infinitely fascinating play. The problem has always lain in Shakespeare's blend of romance and realism. He inherits from Boccaccio the story of the doctor's daughter who wins, through the bed trick, the man who has rejected her because of her status. But Shakespeare turns his heroine, Helena, into a mixture of calculation and passion. By juxtaposing the French king and the Countess with the bumptious Bertram and the braggart Parolles, Shakespeare transforms the story into a meditation on the sadness of age and the follies of youth. Doran's solution to the difficulties is to treat the play as a realistic fairytale. Claudie Blakley's Helena is both a magician and a woman confident enough of her worth to ask the dying king "but if I help, what do you promise me?" Dame Judi's perfect countess is also both beneficent godmother and a woman anguished by her son's behaviour: for all her goodness, what I shall remember is her regret as Bertram's sins are revealed. But, by setting the action in the 17th century, Doran also shows the play to be a bridge between Twelfth Night and the late romances. The humiliation of Guy Henry's Parolles echoes the punishment inflicted on Malvolio. But when Blakley's veiled Helena is resurrected from death in the final act, one's heart misses a beat, as it does with the restoration of Hermione in The Winter's Tale. The hardest part is Bertram, whom Johnson described as "dismissed to happiness". But, without exculpating him, Jamie Glover's look of horror at the end of a husband-choosing elimination-dance is comprehensible. But everything about this production, from Gary Waldhorn's king to Charles Kay's acerbic Lord Lafeu, fits perfectly into place. It is Dench who is drawing the crowds, but the triumph lies in the restoration of an unforgiveably neglected play.

The Evening Standard (London)

December 12, 2003

DAME JUDI SETS COMEDY ROMP ON FIRE

Dame Judi Dench injected an adrenaline rush of vitality into the anaemic body of the Royal Shakespeare Company last night. She was returning to the Stratford stage, on which she has not performed for more than twenty years, as the melancholic Countess of Rossillion. In Gregory Doran's comically pointed production of Shakespeare's darkish fairy-tale about a French nobleman tricked into a marriage of inconvenience, Dame Judi pulled off the invaluable trick of theatrical surprise.

Her Countess is not the familiar grande dame, benevolently languishing in the autumnal shades of life. She blazes with anger and dismay, engendered by her son Bertram, who recoils from the idea of marrying Helena, a mere physician's daughter. This frosty, formidable Countess, across whose face smiles come like cracks in the ice, scathingly dismisses her heir as a chronic disappointment and passionately upholds Helena as a cherishable daughter-in-law. It is a performance rich with emotion.

The Countess, though, hovers attractively on the periphery of the action, staged in front of Deirdre Clancy's exquisitely beautiful and evocative panels, with their black and white view of a country estate in winter's depths. And Doran's production itself never grapples with the fascinating , psychological problems posed by All's Well. He stages the play as if it were more a lusty fairy-tale romp from Paris to war and back again than an Ibsenite problem-play about a bourgeois girl fighting a canny battle in the sex war to win her aristocratic man.

What, though, ought we make of the action of Helena, the Countess's ward, who secretly adores Bertram, cures the King of France of grave illness and reacts to the monarch's offer of anything she wants by insisting upon Bertram's hand and unwilling body in marriage. Elizabethans, who regarded marriage as a commercial contract and not a romantic issue, would have thought such behaviour sensibly opportunist. Claudie Blakley, who interestingly presents Helena as a smitten, dowdy teenager in plaits, makes her a heroic love-fanatic. And Helena's desperate bedroom trick to ensure she will secure an unwilling husband for life ought be more the stuff of cruel black comedy than the drama of plaintive suffering Miss Blakley makes it.

Bertram, who tries to wriggle out of marriage to the unbitter end, seems undeveloped and immature. But he is played misguidedly and sentimentally by Jamie Glover as a proper Boy's Own hero, who reveals none of the role's panic or slyness. When the pair finally stand together as a couple there is no sense of what they feel or will do. But though the play's central problem is never really faced, the production achieves a wide comic sweep: Guy Henry's long-haired, flamboyant Parolles, a camp complex of affectations, swaggering and pathos, makes this son-of-Falstaff creation and Bertram's boon companion into a fine vanity case.

Both Charles Kay's Lafeu, with his fez, moustaches, and shafts of elegant sarcasm, and Gary Waldhorn's pert sardonic king of France maintain a lofty detachment from the passions of love and war in which Parolles is set up, mocked and tormented. This overlong production, which comes to London's Gielgud theatre in February, lacks the psychological depth and pathos of Trevor Nunn's classic, Edwardian production. But its broad comedy hits home.

 

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (LONDON)
December 12, 2003, Friday

Dench makes every word count

by Charles Spencer

ALL'S Well that Ends Well is one of the least loved of Shakespeare's plays, but watching Gregory Doran's superb production, which brings Judi Dench back to Stratford for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, one wonders why.

In this rich, deeply felt staging of a notoriously dark and elusive comedy, Doran mines a rich seam of both sadness and tantalisingly tentative happiness. And Dench once again proves, perhaps for the last time for there are no great female roles in the canon left for her to play, what a truly great Shakespearean actress she is.

The Countess of Rousillon who sees her unlovable son Bertram first marry and then abandon Helena, the orphan child entrusted to her care, is not the largest of roles, but Dench makes every word, and every gesture count.

She takes to the stage with extraordinary authority, a formidable old trout who goes on to reveal astonishing depths of tenderness, pain and humour.

When Dench is at her best, as she is here, she discovers layers of meaning and emotion in even the most unpromising lines, and her silence can be more eloquent than the most impassioned words of other, lesser actors. She has extraordinary presence, of course, but beyond that there is a fund of palpable humanity, and an ability to achieve a kind of rapt intimacy with other actors, and the audience, that is positively transcendent.

There is a moment here, when she identifies with the sharp sorrow of Helena's love, and declares "Even so it was with me when I was young", that is heart-catching in its emotional intensity. And when she hugs Helena, who returns from what everyone thought was her death at the end, it is hard to repress the sentimental fantasy that here is a great performer passing the baton on to another actress of glorious promise.

For Claudie Blakley, whom I have often praised in the past, fulfils all her potential here. When reading the play, Helena can seem an alarmingly manipulative character, seizing on Bertram as a favour from the king she has miraculously saved from death, and then resorting to the most devious trickery to get him back when he has deserted her.

Blakley, however, who has a beautifully affecting husky catch in her voice very similar to Dench's own, plays the role with a mixture of mischievous grace and raw emotional candour that goes to the heart.

Her suffering at the hands of Jamie Glover's cold-hearted and snobbish Bertram is so palpable that we rejoice in her ingenuity and refusal to go under. And at the end, as Helena and her repentant husband are left alone on stage, together again at last, but standing several feet apart, Doran's production achieves a magnificent tension, as the audience is left wondering whether all really will be well.

The RSC has received endless stick over the past couple of years, but shows like this reveal there is vigorous life in the company yet. There isn't a single weak performance here, and this neglected play is revealed to be something very special indeed, a twisted, wintry work that holds out the tentative promise of spring, a study in cruelty that also hints at the possibility of redemption.

There are some superb supporting performances. Guy Henry, one of the RSC's most brilliant comic actors, is in vintage form as the braggart Parolles, delivering his orotund lies with outrageous, plummy authority, while Charles Kay is wonderfully amusing as the fussy old courtier, Lafeu. When he announces at the tense and touching conclusion "Mine eyes smell onions: I shall weep anon" he might be speaking for the whole house.

If this really is Dame Judi's last Shakespearean performance, she is going out in a production worthy of her tremendous gifts.