All's Well that Ends Well: bedtrickery

Vancouver: Director Rachel Ditor’s All’s Well that Ends Well at Bard on the Beach has lots to recommend it, including well-thought-out set and costume design, good timing, and accomplished acting.  But what most struck me about this production is its cheerfulness.  Although the play begins in mourning and ends with a possible repetition of the same mistake that put its plot into gear in the first place, Ditor has cut and spliced Shakespeare’s play to produce a lean, sweet comedy.  Lois Anderson’s appealing Helena, both wholeheartedly loving and pleasantly self-aware, becomes the heart of the play, lively and warm, impulsive yet steady.  And the moments where Craig Erickson, playing the caddish Bertram, is on the spot, either teetering into communion with Helena or caught out in a lie in front of his mother and the king, are deliciously slippery and alive. 

Helena loves Bertram.  She wins his hand when she effects a miracle cure of the dying king, but Bertram doesn’t want to marry Helena, so he leaves for war in Italy to escape from her, telling her he will never live as her husband until she has the ring on his finger and is pregnant with his child.  The opening added silent interlude in Ditor’s production, in which the two young people play “can’t catch me” with a long black glove until Bertram hoists Helena over his shoulder and carries her offstage as she joyfully hugs him around the waist, effectively framed these “impossible conditions” as an invitation. 

A second silent interlude in Act 4 deals with the “unstageable” bed trick by which Helena gets herself knocked up, and in which the black glove again appears. The bed trick is a favorite device of early modern drama, in which A thinks she or he is having sex with B, when really she or he is having sex with C.  All’s Well’s bed trick takes place at the home of Diana, the Italian maiden that Bertram plans to seduce and abandon.  This home, a female space that is safe and hospitable to Helena, is characterized by embroidered linens hung to dry all over the stage at the beginning of the second act. Clean laundry aptly contrasts with Bertram’s impure intentions, and a sheet then serves to cover the lovers in the bed trick. 

The bed trick is a great device, but many people find it just a teensy bit unrealistic.  This production addresses that problem by having Diana blindfold Bertram, then continue to tease him for a minute while Helena joins her, loosely echoing her movements, until finally Helena is left alone with him.  While this still may not be entirely plausible, it has the advantage of portraying a physical complicity between the women. 

The blindfolding of Bertram then becomes parallel to the blindfolding of Parolles, the braggart soldier, which invites the audience to compare their characters.  Both need to stop lying so much and take responsibility for their desires.  Parolles quickly does this once his pretensions are exposed, and I felt relief from his character when he took off his wig, relaxed his posture, and decided that “Simply the thing I am/Shall make me live.”  Bertram holds out longer, but the riddles, rings, and apparent resurrection of Helena in the final scene force him to confess his errors and accept his wife—which in this version of the play also seemed to entail accepting—maybe even learning--a truth about himself.

Shakespeare’s original play held the heterosexual love story up for examination not only with its unconventional plot construction (girl chases boy, rather than the other way around), but also because of the basic fact that in the Shakespearean theatre all of the female characters were played by boys or men, making the performance of gender a matter of theatrical art. It might be fun for Bard to challenge its audience a bit more in this regard—if we can have a Victorian All’s Well, why not an all-female Henry V, or an all-male Troilus and Cressida?  Unfortunately, the Bard audience currently seems to automatically titter every time a cross-dressed actor appears on stage.  Ditor’s production made good use of the audience’s reaction, though: it deployed selective cross dressing to lighten up potentially threatening topics (like the unwanted pregnancy and shame that could result from Bertram’s attempted seduction of Diana), while at the same time actor Haig Anderson’s deadpan grace made us take his female character seriously at some level.  Also, true to its Shakespearean roots, the production did explore a range of approaches to being male and/or female, including an Oscar Wildean, handkerchief-waving Lord Lafew. 

I have to admit that before seeing the play, I was turned off by the Victorian mise en scene, which seemed like kind of an easy choice for a play about unowned desires.  But in fact the production opened up an effective dialogue between Shakespeare’s text, “Victorianness,” and our present moment.  First, there is the question of female desire: the assertive Helena resonates with the Victorian “new woman,” while her desire to lose her virginity “to her liking” after marriage to a man may seem distinctly un-radical to many in today’s audience.  Second, as Ditor says in her program notes, the layered Victorian costumes express for a 21st century audience a juxtaposition of external propriety and inward sexiness.  This juxtaposition is startlingly revealed in Act 1, scene 2, when the Countess (Bertram’s mother and Helena’s guardian) strips to her petticoat, dons a morning coat that leaves her undergarments displayed, and then confronts Helena about her love for Bertram.  The display of the matronly body in Victorian underwear, along with the countess’s obvious sympathy with Helena’s desire, set up a sort of inter-generational voyeurism in the play, while also inviting the audience to see its own gaze.  Also, the inner/outer dichotomy fits well with Bertram’s misdeeds and Helena’s passions. 

But my favorite aspect of Ditor’s mise en scene was the decision to make the clown, Lavatch, look like a pipe smoking Sigmund Freud.  This is a play that lends itself to psychoanalytical inquiry (“the danger is in standing to’t; that’s the loss of men, though it be the getting of children”) And it is a play about acknowledging hidden feelings and desires.  But putting Freud (a genius whose thought founded the discipline of psychology and ushered in the modern era, yet a man whose ideas were shaped by the patriarchal and heterosexist assumptions of his time) in the role of clown reminds us not to let Freud (however you take him) spoil the fun.