All's Well That Ends Well @ Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London
In the end… But first you have to ask the question why is our heroine with this horrible man in the first place? Why did she even think to choose him as her life partner when he’s obnoxious?
Candlelit and small-scale at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (just down the street from the Globe Theatre), this Shakespeare play was a terrific setting to send in the New Year. Unfortunately, the cast tended to play to the sides too much rather than centre-stage, so restricted cheap view really was restricted. Though through adopting a Picasso painting stance you could still see something (most of the time!) At other points, the cast joined us - soldiers sneaking in through the audience, and some of the cast vaulting onto the stage over the stalls. Another nice moment was the cast exiting and entering through the audience at points as the Trompe-l'œil backdrop ever more collapsed. And one point the stage was covered with swags of snowy cotton wool!
I didn’t know the story of this Shakespeare play and to be honest, went away baffled. I’m not sure what I was meant to take away from it - it celebrates a woman’s courage, intelligence and integrity, getting her value in the only ways society allowed her - obvious favour of her husband, pregnancy, wifely status and a bed trick.
However, her husband was so repugnant throughout and unfaithful (and really politely unkind to her in public) that you had to wonder why she wanted to be anywhere near him at all. Thankfully the King was always on her side.
Helen (favourite physician of the King) after healing him) is permitted any husband she chooses - and in a royal Love Island kind of moment, chooses the son and friend of her childhood. Only he’s horrible and hates her, even though he’s an orphan, newly minted Count living his best life in Paris. For here, he appears to be having an affair with his soldier companion and bestie. The first thing he does is send his newly royally approved wife away into the country - forever, to see her no more! At every point he despises her and hates her.
However, Helen will have none of this and with the cunning help of another woman, that her husband’s hitting on and bigamously pledging to marry, seeks to get her husband’s favour through a symbolic family ring, and his descendants, through a pregnancy. But it’s baffling why she likes him in the first place - and baffling why she keeps going against his bad treatment to try and win him. He’s appalling. (And she knows it). Why doesn’t she get the King to do something about him?!!!
Equally baffling is (like the tormenting of the joke Welsh. Irish and Scots in Henry V) is how the soldier friend/lover introduces New Romantic fashions to Shakespearean-ish England and sets himself up to be a strategic fighter, a duelist - when he’s anything but. It all ends badly and heart-brokenly for him.
More amusing was the duping of the horrible unfaithful husband by the new girl he’d impressed - and his wife. And the girl’s truthful (but very confusing) explanation to the King. And ofcourse the wife has been disguised as a runaway nun for much of the play! She may even have faked her own death with a Winter’s Tale kind of funeral.
Lessons learned - stay at court with the King! I did enjoy seeing Siobhán Redmond as a graceful, noble Countess; Ruby Bentall finally in a ‘pretty’ role and Richard Katz’s King. (Of France obviously). Georgia-Mae Myers played a smitten and gentle, then horrified, young woman, Diana, played and preyed upon by the horrible husband. Enjoyable too was the dramatic music, delivered by a soprano in a golden goddess gown from a balcony, and the moments when the cast made like Mafia at a funeral, with everyone in shades!