All's Well That Ends Well (26 page)

The absence of so many of the play's events from the stage also pulls our focus to the events that actually do occur onstage—Bertram's rejection of Helen, his decision to run away, Parolles'
betrayal of Bertram, and Helen's eventual acceptance of him following his pleas of “pardon.” These are the events that really delineate that play's most significant journey—the evolution of the relationships between Helen, Bertram, and Parolles—and this journey becomes so much clearer because so many of the other events occur outside of our view.

In terms of how all of this affected our production, I think it was this emphasis on human behavior that led me to take a decidedly Chekhovian approach to the production. The autumn became a major reference point in terms of the physical world, and it was important to me that the play finish in a sort of “magical fall,” which captured not only the play's particular pensiveness and its emphasis on time and age, but also its capacity for miraculous redemption. The actors' work also focused on the exploration of those fine details and nuances of human behavior that we frequently associate with Chekhov. All of this, I believe, stems in some degree from the play's emphasis on language, and its tendency to talk about an event rather than to show it directly.

Shakespeare often yokes together seemingly incompatible plot elements; is
All's Well
a radical play about the removal of class barriers and a woman's right to choose her partner, or a fairy tale with its roots in folklore, or something between the two?

Doran:
It's a bittersweet play, a sort of realistic fairy tale. It has fairytale elements, but I think you have to root it in reality. We didn't heighten the sense of fairy tale. I took a rather historicist point of view about the play, again in relationship to the Sonnets. It seemed to me that you could quite easily connect Bertram to either the Earl of Pembroke or Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, two of Shakespeare's patrons, both of whom, like Bertram, had refused marriages to women who they thought were not right for them. I was also fascinated by the possibility that Shakespeare and the King's Men, in order to avoid the plague in 1603, had come to Wilton House, where Mary Pembroke, Sidney's sister, ran this sort of Academy and patronized many poets, writers, and scientists. This was the world of the Countess of Rossillion. We were therefore quite specific and set our production absolutely in 1603/1604.

It's a Blackfriars play rather than a Globe play. It has a concentration of thought and an ambiguity of character which is interesting. From one point of view, Helen is a stalker: she wants her man and she stalks him all the way to Paris and he finds himself stuck with marrying her. That's not the basis for a great relationship, is it? On the other hand, she recognizes something profound about her love for him.

We were interested in the class element in the Sonnets, where the poet is devoted to the young man who is way beyond him in terms of social standing. Shakespeare was just an ordinary boy from Warwickshire, and perhaps in the portrait of Helen there was something autobiographical. Also in Parolles—from the French word
parole:
what better way for Shakespeare to disguise himself than to call himself “words”? Parolles is a spectacular wordsmith. He is also a pompous braggart, but he learns something very precise about living life.

Fried:
I think it's something between the two. When I first encountered
All's Well That Ends Well
, what initially appealed to me was the way that it begins very much like a fairy tale, but that as the young characters go out into the world and actually experience life, the fairy tale breaks down. Shakespeare pushes the story beyond its fairytale roots into a far more complicated exploration of human behavior, and also of the flaws in each of us and in the world we live in.

That said, I don't think that the play ever really becomes so direct as to be called “a radical play about the removal of class barriers and a woman's right to choose her partner.” Helen's “right” to choose Bertram isn't really the central question of the play—as the Countess gives Helen her blessing in the play's third scene, and the King sanctions the union three scenes after that. While class barriers certainly play a huge role in the play, I think Shakespeare is trying to get at something even deeper and more universal, and the barriers between Helen and Bertram are simply a device Shakespeare uses to get at the idea of an “impossible dream.” He seems to be asking, “What do you do when you achieve your dream and it turns out to be something less perfect than you imagined it to be?” Is the thing you have always aspired toward worth pursuing if it reveals itself to be flawed? In this way, Shakespeare seems to be interrogating the idea of a fairy tale quite brilliantly. The world will never live up to our happily-ever-after
aspirations, he seems to be saying, so how should we cope with the inevitable disappointments of human existence? In this way, the play's tone becomes almost Shavian: an idealistic and somewhat naive heroine pursues a goal obsessively, only to discover that that goal isn't all that she thought it would be, and as a result, she's forced to mature and develop a more nuanced and pragmatic worldview.

It has been suggested that
All's Well
is the “lost” Shakespeare play
,
Love's Labour's Won;
did you give any credence to this theory and did your production glance at the idea at all?

Doran:
No. I know what
Love's Labour's Won
is, I am absolutely certain of it: it's
Much Ado About Nothing
. When I did
Love's Labour's Lost
with David Tennant and Nina Sosanya, the relationship between Rosaline and Berowne is left at the end with the imposition of one year in which they have to be apart from each other. Berowne has to go and tend the sick. So as the relationship ends you don't know when or whether these people are going to get back together.

At the beginning of
Much Ado About Nothing
Beatrice and Benedick have this past history. They have been wounded. Maybe he didn't come back after the year apart, or she believed his promises but he didn't quite live up to them. But he's still a wit and the relationship between Rosaline and Berowne transmogrifies into Benedick and Beatrice. So I am sure that
All's Well That Ends Well
is not
Love's Labour's Won
, but
Much Ado About Nothing
is. It never occurred to us that this had any relationship to
Love's Labour's Won
, because ultimately the love's labors
aren't
won.

Fried:
I can't say that I ever thought about this while working on
All's Well That Ends Well
. I had heard a theory that
Much Ado About Nothing
was actually the lost
Love's Labour's Won
, and the similarities between that play and
Love's Labour's Lost
, and particularly between Berowne and Rosaline and Benedick and Beatrice, always gave this theory a little more plausibility for me.

Helen's often seen as a problematic heroine; many have questioned why someone so clever and lively falls for and then has the bad taste to foist herself on an unattractive spoiled brat, using
the morally dubious bed trick. How did you reconcile the different aspects of her character?

Doran:
I think she has a certainty about her: she knows this is right. The bed trick is seen from her perspective as a sort of corrective for Bertram's bad behavior. Bertram is immature; he doesn't want to be shackled by marriage or by the society of the French court. Going off and becoming General of the Horse is liberating for him; he wants to sow his wild oats and play the field. Diana realizes how attractive this young man is and although she resists him he has a kind of charisma that is irresistible to somebody like Helen. She firmly believes she is the one who can solve his problems; she will make him fall in love with her. His mother, the Countess, sees that this love is there, does not object to it on class grounds because she sees the virtue and integrity in Helen and therefore allows the depth of her love to prosper.

Fried:
As I was working on
All's Well That Ends Well
, I frequently found myself defending the play against critics who took issue with Helen's love for the seemingly undeserving Bertram. Without question, Helen's flight from Rossillion at the end of Act 3 Scene 2, and her continued pursuit of Bertram in Florence even after he has so harshly rejected her, pose a problem for any postfeminist reading of the play. Yet I feel quite strongly that to look at the play as the story of a “clever and lively heroine who falls for an unattractive spoiled brat” denies the possibility that both Helen and Bertram must change and mature over the course of the play. I think it's very important to recognize—as I strove to make clear through my production—that Helen begins the play as a fairly sheltered and somewhat naive girl who confuses childlike obsession and idol worship with mature love. It is only after her idol rejects her that she must then confront reality and mature into the woman who, presented with Bertram at the end of the play, is able to define the terms by which she is to be wed rather than simply giving herself over unquestioningly.

This doesn't completely solve the problem of why Helen continues to pursue Bertram even after he rejects her. Yet I think it's unfair to expect that Helen should behave rationally when it comes to Bertram. How often is love rational? And how frequently has each of us fallen head over heels for someone completely undeserving of
that love? Is Helen's love for Bertram easy to watch? Certainly not. But does it reveal a deeply honest truth about the irrational and inexplicable actions of the human heart? Without a doubt. In my production, when Helen mused in Act 4 Scene 4, “But, O strange men, / That can such sweet use make of what they hate,” she seemed to recognize both the irrationality and also the inevitability of her love. Fully aware of Bertram's disdain for her, she was nonetheless filled with wonder over the sweetness of their night together.

Regarding the bed trick, by the time it appears in the play we've seen Helen put through so much abuse that I think most audience members are willing to forgive the moral questions that this tactic raises. More importantly, this shockingly cynical and pragmatic approach to winning a husband represents an important stage of Helen's maturation—gone are her more noble fantasies of how a man ought to be won, and she is now willing to face the world with all of its ugliness, to roll up her sleeves, and to do whatever she needs to do to get what she wants. In her bold disregard for the conventional morality that would stop such actions, there is, ironically, a unique sort of feminism. She doesn't particularly care about the morality behind what she's doing; for better or for worse, she's out to win Bertram, and understands that she must beat him at his own game in order to do so.

Bertram seems to have no redeeming qualities as a character and when cornered performs a one-line volte-face; how did you handle him and his sudden change of heart?

Doran:
I think he is young, and I know that is often an excuse, but I think his youth and his hot temper make him behave impulsively. Such is the strength of Helen's love that I think that Bertram is moved in the final moments to realize that here is a good woman who loves him, and could he really ask for more than that? But there is still at the end a question of whether or not the marriage is going to be happy. Has she tamed him? Is that morally acceptable? That ambiguity is at the heart of the play and is what makes it one of the “problem plays,” as they used to be called, of that middle period.

Fried:
As unpleasantly pragmatic as it sounds, the first advice that I would give to any director of
All's Well That Ends Well
is to be sure
when casting Bertram to find a dazzlingly charismatic young man whose charm and allure radiate even when he has nothing to say, and even in spite of the many unpleasant things that Shakespeare has given him to say. Without this, the audience will have a very hard time understanding and sympathizing with Helen's obsession with him, and in order for the play to “work,” I think that we must be able to sympathize with Helen.

I also think that it's crucial that, like Helen, Bertram be allowed to mature and develop over the course of the production, and not be played as fully formed at the beginning. We must meet him not as a confirmed cad, but as a young man who still has a huge amount to learn, whose head is filled with misconceptions as to what “honour” and “nobility” really mean, and who is heading out into the world seeking these ideals having put all of his trust in the hands of a rascal named Parolles. It is easy for a production to dismiss Parolles as simply a clownish jokester, but I think that Bertram's ultimate redemption (and thus, the play's resolution and our ability to believe in Helen) is only possible if we understand that Bertram starts the play misguidedly trusting Parolles with his life. For this reason, I pushed Parolles away from a clownish fool and toward a more believably cynical and self-serving young man with great charisma, huge ambitions, and few, if any, scruples. In this way, Bertram's admiration and trust in him becomes more real and, as a result, Parolles' betrayal becomes a crushing event for Bertram. It forces him to reassess his estimation of the people around him, and ultimately to transform into a man that we can tolerate Helen ending up with. When Bertram enters into Act 4 Scene 3, since the last time we have seen him he has received news of both Helen's supposed death and his mother's approbation, he has slept with a woman he believed to be Diana, and he has also been informed that his best friend has offered to betray the secrets of the camp, so the man who enters into this scene is a very different Bertram than the man we last saw wooing Diana. It was important to me that his speech, “I have tonight dispatched sixteen businesses, a month's length apiece …,” be filled with a sort of distracted wonder, as if the sheer volume of life experience he has acquired in the last several hours has forced him to reconsider the life choices he has made thus far in the play. By the end of this scene, his
dearest friend will be revealed to him as even more insidious than he previously thought possible, so Bertram leaves Florence a shaken man, eager to create himself anew upon his return to Rossillion.