The absolute pits: All’s Well That Ends Well at the Sam Wanamaker
All’s Well That Ends Well
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Upper Gallery D6 standing, £10
12 January 2018
Shakespeare’s Globe page
It is with heavy heart that I report this All’s Well That Ends Well ranks among the worst pieces of professional theatre I have seen. Sigh.
Augmenting Shakespeare is a risky strategy and doesn’t pay off for director Caroline Byrne and dramaturg Annie Siddons. Their additions (I assume they are theirs) sound dismally cloth-eared against the original, the discarded shards of which mournfully lurk in the background, unheard but not forgotten.
There are ways of speaking Shakespeare’s text that illuminate its beauty more than reading; there are also ways of speaking it that make the meaning hard and the verse mystifying. For any text, there are ways of speaking that enable a small audience to hear every word and there are ways where the audience hears every other word at best. Several All’s Well actors – Ellora Torchia as Helena, Imogen Doel as Paroles, Hannah Ringham as the Clown – fall into the latter on both counts. It becomes impossible to keep sympathy with the broader project if you can’t hear what the actors are saying, especially when, given the venue is so small, it should be possible to make everyone in the audience feel included.
The play is tricksy, for sure, and perhaps no director today could resist serving up a personal interpretation. Interpreting it so far as to state that all really is well seems to me daft. What is Byrne saying when she radiantly presents a final family nucleus of Helena, Bertram and baby? She can’t be saying what I think she’s saying but I can’t think how else she’d imagine it be read.
Healthy quantities of wretched pseudo-Shakespeare; inaudible real Shakespeare; a baffling happy ending; and throw in extraneous nudity and incredibly poorly judged sex jokes and you have one miserable evening.
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