All’s Well That Ends Well

All’s Well That Ends Well
By William Shakespeare. Sport for Jove. Seymour Centre, Sydney. March 27 – April 12, 2014.

Despite recent debate about auteur directors overloading classics with their own contemporary readings and staging little of the original, Shakespeare should thank his stars for Damien Ryan.

All’s Well That Ends Well is a rarely staged, so-called Problem Play which I’ve never seen. So first, it’s exciting to go to a Shakespeare and not know the (fantastical) ending! Set in France and in wars in Italy, it’s a fairy tale mix of tragedy and comedy, and one of his most explicit plays about sexual politics. 

 

Lowborn Helena cures the crippled King of France and is allowed to choose her unrequited love, Count Bertram, as husband. He (rather inexplicably) rejects their new marriage and rushes off to the male glories of war-making.  Dressed as a pilgrim, Helena pursues him and, in the lengthy second act, creates an elaborate deceit to trick him into lovemaking and commitment.

Ryan brings a very fresh contemporary storytelling to this creaky saga. The French court is here a crack regimental team, bristling with male prowess, and the Florentine sisters who aid Helen’s trickery also bristle with sexy, sassy power (within the limits, of course, of Elizabethan feminism).

When Helen first chooses her Count from the soldiers, they stand alert before her stark naked. And the production makes inventive use of Ipads and smart phones in place of letters, statements of evidence and flashbacks. Ryan achieves all this smart wit and inventive gesture without one false note or without, seemingly, hacking into Shakespeare’s text and narrative. 

This dramaturgical rigour is brilliantly supplemented in the set and contemporary costumes by Antoinette Barboutis. On the York Theatre’s thrust stage, her four-postured black square shifts artfully from the vital, central image of a bed into a sauna, camp hospital, mortuary and other army scenes – all excellently lit by Toby Knyvett.

With a touch of Prince Harry, Edmund Lembke-Hogan delivers a refreshing gung-ho performance as the rather stupid Bertram, and Francesca Savige engages as the virtuous if obsessive Helena. George Banders excels as the flawed, flamboyant servant Parolles – even if the long unfolding of his subplot becomes weary.  Also finely played is Robert Alexander as the King of France and Sandra Eldridge as the dowager Countess, one more fond of her loyal daughter-in-law then her own son.

All’s Well that Ends Well is a thrilling, often tender production which plucks perfectly the play’s themes of love, sex and war play.

Martin Portus

 

Photographer: Seiya Taguchi

Subscribe to our E-Newsletter, buy our latest print edition or find a Performing Arts book at Book Nook.