Globe, London
This is a good, clear, well-spoken production by John Dove of one of Shakespeare's most beguiling but least-loved plays. All it misses, for reasons that may not be entirely its own fault, is the melancholy that pervades a comedy that Barbara Everett once described as "elegiac rather than saturnalian".
Two particular performances suggest intelligent reinterpretation. The problem with the play is always Bertram, who seems a snobbish rotter on rejecting marriage to Helena on the grounds that she is "a poor physician's daughter". But Sam Crane plausibly plays him as a callow youth heavily influenced by the laddish military ethos and half in love with the woman he spurns: even when, after their imposed union, he tells Helena to "haste to horse" he gives her a long, lingering look filled with quiescent desire. Janie Dee as his mother, the Countess of Roussillon, is also much younger than usual and invests the character with a sparky volatility: at one point, she slaps Helena's face to shock her out of her father-fixated grief and even seems to relish robust, double entendre-filled badinage.
Ellie Piercy is also a direct, forceful Helena: the character Shaw so much admired as a prototypical Ibsenite heroine. Underneath the determined opportunist there is, however, a touch of the magician about Helena, and Piercy might relish more the rhetorical passage where she urges her curative powers on the diseased French king. But the comedy is in good hands with James Garnon's popinjay of a Parolles, whose cowardice is revealed in the scene where, thinking he has been captured by the enemy, he is prepared to say anything under duress: what might, to the Elizabethans, have looked like a display of treachery now seems to us like a demonstration of the dangers of extraordinary rendition.
While there is much to enjoy, the audience's truffle-hunting eagerness to seize on every available laugh militates against the play's sombre beauty. The spectators roar when Bertram greets a Florentine girl with "They told me that your name was Fontybell", guffaw loudly when Sam Cox's French king announces "I am wrapped in dismal thinkings" and go into positive hysterics when Michael Bertenshaw's hyperactive Lafeu, at the deeply moving climactic reunion, declares, "Mine eyes smell onions." There is a mature sadness about this comedy that gets lost in the Globe's party atmosphere. As John Gielgud once said of The Importance of Being Earnest, sometimes it is an actor's duty, in the interests of the play, to stop an audience laughing.