All’s Well that Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s less-performed plays—and for good reason. Yet many people, myself included, hope to see every Shakespeare play at least once in our lives, and for people like us, the current production at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival is a good choice.
The plot revolves around the obsessive, relentless love of Helena–the intelligent, strong-willed, and conniving daughter of a brilliant physician–for her social superior, Count Bertram. The play has the typical Shakespeare quota of disguises, cross-dressing, and clever tricks.
Usually the Shakespeare plays that end with marriage leave us happy, but it’s not at all clear that the play really does “end well.” Helena gets her man, but the fourth and fifth acts have revealed Bertram to be just as shallow, selfish, and wildly mendacious as his comically dishonest friend Parolles; indeed, Parolles at least recognizes himself, Bertram, and Bertram’s friends for the rogues that they are.
The trend these days is to set Shakespeare performances in futuristic techno-worlds, or tribal Africa, or a 1950s drive-in, or any other location remote from the world of Shakespeare himself. The CSF production is a welcome change of pace, set in Restoration England, which happens to be the period of the earliest recorded performance of All’s Well. The text itself sets the play in France and Italy, during a war between Florence and Siena. The Restoration motif isn’t precisely contemporaneous with the literal text, but it’s reasonably close.
The CSF version is said to take place precisely in 1660, the year that woman first appeared on stage in Shakespeare plays. So the play opens with an all-male cast “rehearsing” a production of All’s Well. Soon, a message arrives from the king declaring that females should now play female parts; so several actors must yield their parts to actresses. The man who was playing Helena gets replaced, and he resentfully takes over the role of Bertram. The forced transition adds some depth to Bertram’s hostility to Helena, and his ultimate reconciliation to his role as her spouse. It’s interesting to see men playing women as they did at the time of Shakespeare himself, and one female character is still played by a man the whole way through.
The dramaturg’s notes explain that this year’s production is about gender and identity, and the threatening but positive effects of changing traditional roles. The approach is reasonable enough, given that Helena takes the traditional male role as the pursuer, and that her medical knowledge cures the French King of a fatal disease. But it’s just silly to declare, as the dramaturg does,
http://www.coloradoshakes.org/plays/play.php?Year=2007&Play=33
that “opponents of Pelosi and [Hillary] Clinton seek to marginalize them for their assertive qualities.” As if opponents on the right do not just as vehemently oppose male supporters of the Pelosi/Clinton policies, and as if opponents on the left (such as Daily Kos for Clinton, or Cindy Sheehan for Pelosi) are motivated by gender animus rather than disagreement on the issues.
All’s Well is at least in part a comedy, and so it is full Shakespeare’s love of sexual double entendres and ribaldry. Accentuating the theme of changing gender boundaries, the cast inflects the script with male-male sexual wordplay–all delivered by guys with shoulder-length hair and flouncy outfits.
All of the costumes, for whatever gender, are gorgeous, and so are the sets. The acting performances are solid, especially that of Bertram’s mother, the Countess, which is one of Shakespeare’s few major roles for an older female. Falstaff (from Shakespeare’s histories), may be Shakespeare’s most famous comic oaf, but you’ll miss out if you never see a Parolles on stage.
Perhaps the only weak link in the cast is Bertram, a talented but seemingly miscast actor who never displays the charisma that necessary for such a successful rake.
All’s Well that Ends Well continues for two more weeks at the University of Colorado at Boulder, along with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Julius Caesar, plus two non-Shakespeare plays: Around the World in 80 Days, and the 18th-century Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters.
And for those of you who are fans of rarely-performed Shakespeare, start making plans for next summer’s Henry VIII.