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This production is so full of life and so intuitively likeable that I find it difficult to criticize anything in it. Of course its not perfect, but Tina Packer and her cast got the spirit of Shakespeare performance just right—on their own terms, and even the scratchy singing and the less assured among the actors served their purpose within the expectations of the production. To get the bad out of the way at the beginning. The fine actor Nigel Gore will be the first to admit, I hope, that he is not a Roger Daltrey. Tina Packer did not intend for him and the other actors who opened their mouths to sing to turn All’s Well That Ends Well into a rock opera—well, not quite. But Gore and some of his companions excelled at the world-weary rasp, or croak, or gasp of the life-worn child of the sixties, who has seen love and desire come and go many times over. Their fuzzy diction, the limitations of the sound system, and my ears (I’ve always been challenged by picking out the words in rock music.) also served the benevolent purpose of postponing my coming to terms with the elaborate lyrics Tina Packer has concocted from medieval troubadour songs and Shakespeare himself...but more of that later. Oh yes, and I should point out that the vocal interlude in Act IV was just too long. At least the amplification was confined to the musical segments and was entirely avoided during the action, at least I couldn’t detect it.
A talented, experienced, and lucky stage director will create an environment when as many of his or her ingredients, not all of which can be equal, can succeed in a symbiotic fashion. Judging by this production Tina Packer is tops in all three. Built around a core of excellent, seasoned British actors who have been with the company for some years, the cast includes a whole range of Americans as well, from the intuitively Shakespearian and deeply experienced to neophytes, who are not entirely secure in speaking the Bard’s verse and prose. Good diction—intelligent diction, rather—seems to be a Shakespeare & Company policy Packer brought along from her early work with John Barton at the RSC. With this sturdy foundation, she is able to bring actors of entirely different styles and abilities together on the same stage, encourage improvement as well as individual expression, and promote a culture of high energy and spontaneity.
The stage conformed generally to basic Elizabethan design. It is an apron stage with no proscenium and a wide door in the middle of the back wall. There is also an area above it for balcony scenes and the like, most effectively used in this production, as the locus of sparkling girlish high jinks. Straightforward designs on the back wall let us know whether we were in Rossillion, Paris, or Florence. A corner at the left side of the orchestra provided some space for the musicians to play and lounge about, watching the action. Actors could enter and exit through a door to their left, as well as through the audience up and down the aisles. All this amounts to a simple, but flexible set-up for All’s Well and others like it (that is, most of Shakespeare’s plays), which have a good deal of private and public activity.
All’s Well that Ends Well is not the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays. Its problems are such that staging it is still something of a journey into uncharted territory. For one thing, the latter part of the play is noticeably sketchier and less refined the the early acts. Tina Packer responded by filling out the later acts with songs—the least effective part of the production, I’d say, but not misguided or unsuccessful either. The other issue, which has earned it a place among the “problem plays” in the schoolroom, is the way in which its genre, romantic comedy, is undermined by the grim atmosphere of its beginning, and Bertram’s personal defects. The story is a romance between two very young people, hardly older than Romeo and Juliet. Helen has loved Bertram from childhood. They grew up together in the same household on unequal terms, he the son of a noble house, she the daughter of a retainer, a poor but respected physician. By using her late father’s arcane knowledge, Helena wins Bertram as a husband, but he will have none of it, mainly because of her low birth as well as a perfectly understandable urge to preserve his own autonomy. Perhaps his extreme youth can excuse his behavior a little, but a modern spectator is readily inclined to share the disapproval of the King, Bertram’s mother, and both courts. It is hard to believe that this spoiled brat is worth the trouble and danger Helena as undergone for him. Here is a second inequality in the relationship, which inclines the other way. Matters are set right in Act V, very rapidly, even perfunctorily, some have said, and a director has the challenge of making Bertram’s change of heart believable, not to mention the difficulty of countering the despicable impression he has made already in Act II.
This Packer solves brilliantly and simply, through the casting of her leads. Jason Asprey is a handsome man of possibly double the age of his character. Kristin Villanueva, who plays Helena, is a recent SUNY Purchase grad in her first season at S&Co, who looks and acts her character’s age. Charged with idealistic enthusiasm and passion, she throws herself into her project of winning Bertram without a backward glance. Jason Asprey, possibly aided by the mild disconnect of his own age, but mostly through a combination of poise, good looks, and a judicious low-key approach to the part, manages to keep enough of our sympathy to make the story work. Packer has also prepared us with some appealing scenes of neatly done swordplay, taking the protagonists through their childhood years, up to the time of the story. In his fifth act peripeteia, Asprey surprises us with some intense emotional outbursts, very affectingly played, which go far beyond making his conversion believable: it is actually very moving.
The plot revolves around two older figures of authority, the Countess of Rossillion, Bertram’s biological mother and Helena’s figuratively adoptive one, and the ailing King of France, cured by Helena, and her benefactor. Both were splendidly played by Elizabeth Ingram and Timothy Douglas. Ms. Ingram (now in her tenth year at S&Co) gave a centered, but expansive performance of a noblewoman of generous heart who wears her position lightly. Mr. Douglas, an American, is a lanky man with deep, glowing eyes and a strongly boned face, all of which he used with easy mastery to give a rounded portrayal of a wilful and occasionally sharp, but humane monarch. Nigel Gore gave a rich portrayal of Lavache, the “world-weary troubadour” in Tina Packer’s reading, whose role only grew richer as he exchanged bawdy jokes and revealed a mellow intimacy with the Countess. He and Ms. Ingram made a sweet pair. Kevin O’Donnell took a lot of risks in his over-the-top Parolles, in costume surely the most outrageous miles gloriosus I’ve ever seen, burning with intense primary colors. O’Donnell, however, was sensitive to different sides of the role, especially the Falstaff-Hal aspects of his relationship with Bertram, and he was equally effective in beggar’s rags after his fall. He is barely more valued then that at the height of his frippery, when everyone except Bertram valued him at naught. Having nothing he has acquired some slight value. In the scheme of the Shakespeare’s continuous metaphor of value, currency, and trade, he has served his purpose as a foil to Helena, who earned a high value from the King, a tender only Bertram refused to accept.. Ginya Ness delivered a tour de force as Reynalda, the Countess’ attendant—a rather colorless male part in Shakespeare’s text. Through additional stage business, Ms. Ness gave us a throughly amusing caricature of a prudish spinster, an excellent foil for the Countess, who, like Lavache, “has lived.” Brittany Morgan, as Diana, showed a little awkwardness in diction in her first scenes, but her performance was full of life and energy, expressed in her running and dancing with her sisters, et. al. Her command of her lines, however, quickly came together and her broad American accent did no harm.
Kristin Villanueva’s Helena, however, was the most interesting part of all from a critical standpoint. For my part, I was entirely taken with her approach, which was vivid and intense, but I can imagine that some may have found it excessive. She is young, small in stature, beautiful, and full of emotive energy, which she can channel through her voice or her diminutive limbs with imagination and seemingly endless resourcefulness. I must say that I never thought of Helena as such an impulsive, emotionally wrought character, but I found myself engaged in Villanueva’s (and, presumably, Packer’s) concept almost immediately. Running, gesticulating, dancing, she stood out in an already extremely animated performance. She spoke her lines with all the clarity, feeling, and understanding you could want. She is off to an impressive start in a career which will probably include many different kinds of theater and film, but I hope she won’t lose touch with Shakespeare.
Tina Packer’s All’s Well was quite an amazing experience, unique, I think for its balance of solid technique and freedom of expression. While the added songs were in the right spirit, my ears would have been grateful for a little more polish. The texts, however, which S&Co did well to supply to the press, posed an interesting problem. Compiled, as I’ve said, by Tina Packer from troubadour songs and Shakespeare’s own, their overall effect struck me as having little to do with Shakespeare or All’s Well That Ends Well in particular. There is an explicit yearning for redemption in them which floats somewhere between Roman Catholic doctrine, a sort of retro-romanticism, and the New Age, and this jars with my own notions of Shakespeare. The songs, even when Shakespeare-derived, strike me as too explicit, and just a bit too thick and heavy for his tone. On the other hand, the concept of redemption is front and center in many of the plays, but Shakespeare, in his ever-refreshing agnostic way, leaves it up to us to take it as we understand it. (The question of Shakespeare’s crypto-RC origins is an old one and is especially fashionable today. It is in fact interesting and plausible, but, if true, the most amazing thing about it would be how he kept it out of his plays and poems. It takes ingenious scholarship and hard work to find traces of it in the texts.) On the other hand, I would never say that the song lyrics were perverse or objectionable. In fact I like them. I plan to reread them and ponder them further. As far as this production is concerned, they only add one more charm in their thoughtful and intelligent eccentricity.
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