Stage-to-screen review: All's Well That Ends Well(RSC / Sky Arts)

Last year, like this year, a couple of my planned theatre trips outside of That London got scuppered by rail strikes; one of them was Blanche McIntyre's production of All's Well That Ends Well at the RSC. It was a particular shame because McIntyre has been an interesting director of some of the more obscure, more problematic Shakespeare plays, and you don't get many that fit both descriptions better than this one. Rarely performed (arguably with good reason,) it was even included in the original trio of Problem Plays whose tone made them difficult to categorise (like Measure for Measure, which McIntyre's also tackled before, this one got lumped in with the Comedies by the First Folio.) The fact that its lead romantic couple are actually meant to lack any hint of sexual chemistry is the least of the issues which has kept it on the expanded list of plays with seriously problematic elements for a modern audience.

Rosie Sheehy plays Helena, the daughter of a late doctor who served at the court of the Countess of Roussillon. Raised in the court, she's always had a crush on the Countess' son Bertram (Benjamin Westerby) but, if he's even noticed her at all, it's been as more of a sister figure.

When the King of France (Bruce Alexander) becomes seriously ill with a fistula, Helena uses her father's remedies to cure him, and demands Bertram's hand in marriage as her reward. The King, the court and even the Countess (Claire Benedict) think it's a great match; the only person who doesn't is Bertram, who has to consent to the marriage but flees to the wars immediately afterwards, swearing to his new wife that he'll only ever have sex with her if she completes a fairytale-style challenge involving two seemingly impossible tasks. Naturally, Helena sets off after him to trick her way into fulfilling them.

A filmed performance of McIntyre's production was screened on Sky Arts last month, so with my usual (comparative) slowing-down of live theatre trips in August I finally had time to catch up with what the blurb describes as a take "exploring themes of romantic fantasy, toxic masculinity and consent," which seems a fair description of the angles the play is viewed from. Consent is especially at the forefront, as All's Well That Ends Well has the dubious distinction of being the Shakespeare play where the female lead rapes the male lead.

So while neither of the leads is that easy to actually like, McIntyre definitely lets us understand where Bertram's coming from. Young and rash, Westerby's Bertram is hot-headed but also quite sweet and very obviously responding to the way his major life decisions are being made against his will. The snobbery element of his rejection of Helena is toned down, in favour of the fact that she's not someone he ever saw in a remotely sexual way. Sheehy's Helena, meanwhile, is a charming psychopath. In case it wasn't clear this is less love than obsession, she turns up at court in her wedding dress before the groom even knows there's going to be a wedding, and keeps it on for several days afterwards. When he abandons her, she follows him through Italy like a cock-hungry Terminator, converting everyone she meets to her cause of hunting him down.

The famous, euphemistically-named "bed trick" is here done in a loud nightclub, with Helena and Diana (Olivia Onyehara) wearing identical fluorescent wigs so that Bertram can be tricked into sleeping with the former, believing her to be the latter. We don't actually see anyone roofie his drink but the imagery isn't too ambiguous about what's happening here. One of the many problems with this play is the way the comparatively likeable Bertram turns vicious right at the end, including towards Diana whom he professed to love, so now he appears to confirm all the worst accusations made against him. But for the previous two hours we've watched almost everyone in the play, including Diana, collude to make him have sex against his will, which puts a different spin on his dark turn. Centuries before theatres started handling another problematic "comedy" by swapping the genders, Shakespeare had provided his own gender-flipped Taming of the Shrew all along.

The production is modern-dress, making a lot of use of mobile phones and gadgets, mostly the kind with a camera in them somewhere. It's probably best seen in the phoney soldier Parolles, whom Jamie Wilkes plays as an American blowhard - his more ridiculous pronouncements come straight off whatever conspiracy theory website he's looking at on his phone at the time. The drum he's sent to fetch back from the enemy in the play's major comic subplot becomes D.R.U.M, a drone he's very fond of playing with. I'm less convinced by the idea that he's revealed to have been putting on the accent all along - I'm not sure why, if you were self-aggrandising, you'd take on such an easily-derided persona. But McIntyre also finds depths in his downfall - by the time a stinking, almost-naked Parolles turns up begging to Will Edgerton's contemptuous servant, it's clear this gulling has gone too far in the same way that Malvolio's does.

But Todd MacDonald, Hayley Pepler and John Wyver's screen adaptation of the production uses modern touches in a much more distracting way that's presumably meant to throw us into the action but has the opposite effect. There's a lot of use of split-screen and jump-cuts, with the action suddenly being filmed in portrait mode from somewhere in the Stalls, or from a bodycam worn by one of the soldiers on stage. Soliloquies are inconsistently taken out of the theatre entirely and shown in separately-filmed pieces to camera. It's hard to get much sense of Robert Innes Hopkins' set design - it was a long way in before I realised that a gilded cage that hung above the royal court had descended to become the soldiers' tent. Parolles' subplot is particularly marred by the editing, with the camera taking us away in the middle of comic business, or making the action confusing.

I imagine a lot of this appeared in the stage production as projections as well, but at least in person the audience can choose where on the stage they want to concentrate their attention. I suspect the split-screen moments are meant to give some of this element of choosing what actor we focus on, but on film the editing is by definition making these decisions for us, and here there's a lot of choices that perversely seem to actively avoid the areas where the focus should be - it's one thing trying to replicate the experience of being an audience member, quite another replicating the experience of an audience member who isn't paying attention. So between the production itself and the stage-to-screen transfer, applying twenty-first century ideas are what both makes and mars a play that'll no doubt continue to be problematic in one way or another for centuries to come.

All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare was screened on Sky Arts.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including ad breaks.

Photo credit: Ikin Yum.