This is one of my very favourite plays.  The other night I played for the first time the 2011 Globe production in a set of the comedies put out by Opus Arte.  It was a serendipitous choice.

I really enjoyed the show.   I see from the extracts below of my note in Windows on Shakespeare that I thought the Countess was a great role for a leading lady getting on.  Janie Dee at the Globe was perfect – fresh as a daisy – and she knows it.  She oozes West End sexiness – at altitude.

And the relief and redemption of Parolles – a victim of caste – is a very moving and under-rated part of this playwright’s output.

The final resolution is not quite as good at the Globe as in the BBC version – they dropped a critical line – and the performance of Michael Hordern does stay with me.  Otherwise, James Garnon was right up to Parolles.  He and the Countess are for me the two leads.  That view may be said to be idiosyncratic.

In the end, Lafew tells Parolles – ‘Good Tom Drum’ – he will ‘make sport’ with him at home.  It is just like Claude Rains saying ‘This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.’  It’s as if Lafew can not only smell onions, but see that all the world is but a stage.

And it is a reminder that plays are meant to be seen and heard.

Perhaps not enough attention has been paid to Helena’s introduction of Parolles in the first scene:

And yet I know him a notorious liar,
 Think him a great way fool, solely a coward.
 Yet these fixed evils sit so fit in him
 That they take place when virtue’s steely bones
 Looks bleak i’ th’ cold wind. Withal, full oft we see

 Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

If we parse the difficult ending, we may get something like: ‘In the cold light of day, it is often hard to do the right thing, but we often see that those at the bottom of the ladderdo better than those above them.’  Chivalry had been a target – why not mere gentility?  Good grief – it would all sound downright Bolshie at 36 Collins St.

This production is an English gift to the world.  I have been fortunate to see six of the plays at the Globe, but All’s Well is I think the only play of the thirty-eight that I have not seen on the stage (allowing that the three parts of Henry VI were condensed.)   This production may close that loop.

I could not think of a better introduction to William Shakespeare for children than this Globe production – not least because the cast take their bows in dance form to a cheering audience who had been with them all the way.  

And each of the BBC and Globe performances can be bought singly on Amazon.  I recommend both warmly.

And anyone who can trace the Shaw quote below will get a box of Jaffas (not to roll down the aisle at the flicks).

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL – A TALE OF TWO CADS
It is always the Conservatives who stop behaving like gentlemen first.
(G B Shaw)

When an officer and sometime gentleman dumped on the late Princess of Wales, The Times newspaper published a column that concluded by saying that the system had flushed out ‘an absolute shit’. That is a more earthy and more general way of saying that he was a ‘cad’ or ‘bounder’ or ‘rotter’. We have a perpetual interest in this type of figure because it involves a failure in one of the better people, and that gives a degree of comfort to a lot of the rest of us. …. All’s Well that Ends Well has two different types of cad, Bertram, the Count of Rousillon, and his follower, Parolles (a variant of paroles, French for ‘words’). The play involves three themes well known in legends and fairy tales: the healing of a sick king; the completing of the hero of impossible tasks to achieve vindication; and the ‘bed trick’ – someone being duped into sleeping with someone other than the person they thought they were going to bed with. At least some might be precluded from denouncing the bed trick as an impossible fairy tale, because we first see it in Genesis between Jacob and Leah and Rachel……

We have, therefore, two cads. Let us look at the difference between them. Bertram is a spoiled brat……He has the magnificent incapacity of the egocentric to see that another person may be involved. He can think only of himself. He has little or no imagination. The snobbery is not the problem. It is not a question of class, but of caste….

No, the problem is that Bertram is all give and no take. He accepts the benefits, not the burden noblesse, yes; oblige, no. Bertram is the herald of the collapse of the aristocracy……

……..Parolles would have been the final nightmare for Mistress Quickly– he is the definitive ‘swaggerer’…….He is relatively harmless. There is not much malice in him. There is not much of anything there. He just comes and goes like an autumn leaf, but he can only address his betters – nearly everyone– in terms of fantasy. He is a permanent prisoner of fantasy land because he was not born able to cope with the world as the rest of us see it. …. Cads who come from a privileged background have so much more to answer for than cads who have never had a chance.

……. But Parolles knows he is skating on thin ice. ‘They begin to smoke me, and disgraces of late knocked too often at my door. I find my tongue is too foolhardy.’ (4.1.28-30) When the balloon goes up he is ‘thankful’.

… Captain I will be no more
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As Captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it will come to pass
That every braggart shall be found an ass. (4.3.346-351)

The second difference is caste. Bertram is a noble; Parolles is a nobody…. For a lot lesser failing, Parolles is utterly cast out, and returns to Court unrecognised as a beggar. One cad is humiliated and crushed; the other cad is forgiven and pampered – and told to come back for more. Bertram likes to see himself as a victim; Parolles doubtless is one.

This is where this play gets its real edge – in the benefits and burdens of caste – and this has not been sufficiently noticed. The kindly old Lord Lafew (wonderfully played by Michael Horden for the BBC) regularly reminded Parolles of his lack of substance. He does not recognise him on his return. There is a most affecting scene……

This is very high theatre. This broken wreck of a nobody is taken up by the informed charity of an older man who is a member of the real nobility in a way that would have been unthinkable to Count Rousillon or his mates. ‘Give me your hand. How does your drum?’ The simplest words are usually the best, not least with this author.

…. While Coleridge thought Helena was ‘Shakespeare’s loveliest character’, Shaw thought that the Countess was ‘the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written’. The Countess is a great role for great actresses in the autumn of their careers. You can listen to Edith Evans or Celia Johnson in the BBC production. They supply a marvellous blanket of humanity on the rough and nervous edges of the men. The 2009 National Theatre production was a little too twee for some; you feared that Puss in Boots might jump Little Red Riding Hood.

……. Here, then, is a comment on the class structure – if you like, the aristocracy– that looks forward to the protest in The Marriage of Figaro; and the sterner protest in the French Revolution. Just as directors and audiences have altered their perspective on Malvolio and Rigoletto, now it may be time to do so with Parolles……. Perhaps it is just a matter of time until some impious clown suggests that this ratbag Parolles may be a more substantial character than that ratbag Falstaff.  Such a promotion of Parolles would not be without precedent – of the highest order. Royalty. Falstaff may have been the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, but Charles I substituted Parolles for All’s Well as the play’s title in his copy of the Second Folio.

This is a very entertaining night at the theatre. We go to the theatre to be entertained, and also to sit and look down upon ourselves, and come out later with hopefully just a little more light inside than when we went in. From any other playwright All’s Well would be saluted as a great play– and it is a great play, because it affords us a lyrical insight into the way we are.

And let us hear no more of ‘problem’ plays, the subject of a Cambridge weekender.   Troilus and Cressida is too long, and its main characters or ideas are either boring or out of fashion.  But All’s Well and Measure for Measure are not ‘comedies’ as we know that term.  They are plays written with an edge that is just right for modern audiences and written by a great playwright when writing at the height of his powers.  We do not need to have them spoon-fed to us as fairy tales.  That is about all that they were before this genius got his hands on them.