The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

the Hampstead Players’ Summer production

Two very talented actors, new to us as directors, and a play whose title has entered the language, but which most of us hardly knew: two happy discoveries for us all. Matt Williams and Annie Hughes showed us that All’s Well That Ends Well is not really a ‘problem’ play, as scholars have tended to categorise it, provided one treats it for what it is: simply the story of a disparate group of people trying to deal, honourably or otherwise, with the social circumstances in which they have been brought up. Not really tragic ,not always comic, only partly romantic, it may be difficult to categorise, but then, so is life.

It was already an archaic tale when Shakespeare got hold of it. Taken from Boccaccio’s Decameron, written over 250 years earlier, it tells a typically Italian Renaissance story, the key elements of which, though dated, were adopted wholesale by Shakespeare: the authoritarian king who, if he wills, can dictate his subjects’ lives; the self-important, status-conscious young lord (Beltrano di Rossiglione is Boccaccio’s hero); the setting of a seemingly impossible task; the ambitious woman who has to shake off her subservient role in order to achieve her goal. To these, Shakespeare even adds another stock situation: the cruel tormenting of an arrogant courtier.

But to say that the play is only an amalgam of familiar devices – the Measure for Measure bed-trick, the gulling of a Malvolio or a Falstaff, the Merchant of Venice ‘choice’ scenes, the woman who assumes a disguise to make her way in the world – is to do the play an injustice. It is one of Shakespeare’s later, maturer works, and he transforms the old story, and its stock devices, by giving us real human characters, with foibles we all share and principles or ambitions we can all aspire to. It was the great strength of the production that this was brought out. By giving the actors the freedom to explore their characters in depth, it set real people before us.

Full of busy movement, deriving no doubt from the actors’ own conception of how their characters would behave, what it lost to restlessness was well repaid in vitality. And the moments of calm stood out with increased clarity.

At the still centre was the Duchess, a queenly figure round whom the other characters buzzed. Around 1605-6 Shakespeare created an extraordinary  sequence of major female roles: Isabella, Desdemona, the women in Lear, Lady Macbeth, Volumnia and, of course, Cleopatra. Moragh Gee’s beautifully judged performance – calm, serious, wise, humane – confirmed to us that the Duchess belongs in this company.

David Gardner’s King was perhaps a little strong in body and voice fully to convince us that he was at death’s door, but was splendid after his miracle cure: noble and compassionate – despite a Boccaccian plot-line whereby his own status gives him the right to decide who shall marry whom – and then to have the temerity to tick off Bertram for preferring status to love. Bertram himself is a snob; maybe that comes as part of his job as a newly-promoted aristocrat. But Nicolas Holzapfel endeared him to us, giving him a confused vulnerability as he sought seriously for the right thing to do.

The schemer Helena, of course, knows exactly what to do, as she manipulates her way to matrimony. But Sarah Day’s warm, glowing performance humanised her, and her soliloquy scenes provided some calmly poetic interludes. Mary Clare’s Diana, too, was vividly human, from her sluttish seduction of the all-too-willing Bertram, to her tenderness to Helena, and to her spirited indignation in front of the King.
And Adrian Hughes ably charted the journey of Parolles through the sub-plot – from a swashbuckling Captain Jack Sparrow, to an increasingly arrogant knave, to his eventual unmasking as a traitorous coward – this last by means of a disturbing scene of mental torture, which brought an ugly contemporary touch.

This was one of a number of ensemble scenes which remain in the memory, including the opening funeral of the late Duke, an accusing group gathered around Bertram, a lively ‘flurry’ scene with suitcases, and Helena’s ‘choosing’ scene. Here the players of the smaller parts made a big contribution: Matt Williams himself in a cameo role, Malcolm Stern (a dryly humorous Lafew), Harlequin (an uninhibited, scatological Clown), Margaret Pritchard Houston and Jane Mayfield (two terrifying soldiers), together with Jon Waters, Simon Malpas, Barney Lyons and Cristina Báncora, the latter also providing some simple but beautiful choreography. Effective, too, were Jane Mayfield’s costumes, unspecifically modern, as if to emphasise the play’s contemporary relevance, and copious in their variety, requiring numerous quick changes.

All this took place in a cockpit of a space, with the audience gathered close on three sides, tightly enclosed by white drapes, on which images were projected and within which music, sound and light emphasised the action – thanks to Annie Hughes, who designed the lighting, and to Catherine Williams. The closeness created a rapport with the audience, and though the cast seldom addressed them directly, their involvement was very evident.

All’s Well is an enigmatic sort of play, sandwiched as it is between some of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, whose intentions are much clearer. But its humanism gives it a strength of its own, which this very effective Hampstead Players’ production brought out to the full.