All Is Not Well

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All’s Well That Ends Well, Sam Wanamaker’s Playhouse, The Globe, London, 11 December 2024–4 January 2025.

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When asked about how she approaches writing in different literary forms – what makes a novel a novel, poetry poetry, and a play a play – Joelle Taylor declared that, for her, form and genre are simply ‘matters of marketing’. She went even further in a conversation with interviewer Fran Lock at Latitude Festival earlier this summer, explaining that she doesn’t consider genre or form at all while writing. Taylor added that the fact her debut novel, Night Alphabet, is read as a novel rather than a collection of poems, short stories or stage monologues, is a result only of editorial and marketing decisions, made to categorise and sell the work.

It was similar questions of form and genre that came to my mind as I watched Chelsea Walker’s new staging of All’s Well That Ends Well at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. How far does a play’s genre influence its meaning? Is genre really only a ‘matter of marketing’? Questions like these are particularly resonant with regards to Shakespeare. Since the publication of the First Folio, Shakespeare’s work has typically been allotted into three neat genres: comedy, tragedy or history. Comedies involve happy endings, mistaken identities, misunderstandings of massive proportions and often someone to play the fool; tragedies require a tragic hero and a death; and the history plays, while similar to tragedies, focus on characters from English history to distinguish them.

For many productions, this limited choice of genre need not be an issue. A Midsummer’s Night Dream, for example, reads comfortably as a comedy with its fairies and multiple marriages, and there is little concern that viewing Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy misses its meaning. But there are, of course, plays that do not fit so obediently into their ‘generic’ straitjackets. The categorisation of The Tempest, for example, is a cause of much debate among academics. While the First Folio lists it as a comedy, and there are moments of humour, the play overflows with dark and tragic themes: Caliban and Ariel’s enslavement, Prospero’s erratic and existential temper, and the epilogue in which Prospero asks the audience to set him free from his ‘bands / with the help of your good hands’ – a plea many interpret as the Bard speaking directly to his audience. Take the Globe’s 2022 staging of The Tempest, for example – directed by Sean Holmes, the production loudly declared its genre as a comedy by squeezing Prospero into neon yellow speedos and featuring drunken renditions of ‘Three Lions’ throughout. As Miriam Gillinson wrote, the genre was clear: ‘Comedy. Definitely a comedy.’

All’s Well That Ends Well is similarly difficult. Generally put into the hybrid category of ‘problem comedy’, as coined by F. S. Boas in 1896, it’s a play that toys with the insecurities of class, gender and age, and one that sits uncomfortably in its genre of comedy as a result of its unconvincing and problematic ‘bed-trick’ (a character getting into bed with someone who is not the person they think they are getting into bed with). Walker’s production is well aware of this, and it is this tension, the tension between the light and dark, the genres of comedy and tragedy, that creates much of this production’s dynamism, if also at times its confusion.

Settling into the candlelit Sam Wanamaker theatre and flicking through the programme, audience members are prepared for an ominous show. Playing cards go up in flames on the cover of the programme, and a content note warns of sexual assault, physical violence, classism and more. If genre is a matter of marketing, then this production of All’s Well That Ends Well is a tragedy, or at the very least a tragicomedy. It’s presented as another ‘eat the rich’ show, and one that leans into the darkness more than the fun. And for a play whose title acts as a paraphrase of ‘the ends justify the means’, it is no surprise that Machiavellian manoeuvres and manipulation play a central role. It is perhaps surprising, however, that this production so stridently attempts to expose these manoeuvres as the problematic acts of abuse and oppression they are, while keeping the play in keeping with the tone of a comedy.

The play opens with a funeral, the gravity of which is immediately undercut by Matrix-style sunglasses and suits, and a unison chant of dominus deus. Dressed in a golden ballgown, soprano Angela Hicks provides somewhat random musical interludes between scenes, that can be read either as pointless, or as a nod to the absurdly ornate affectations of upper-class wealth. The funeral is for Bertram’s father, who was once the King’s right hand man. Bertram, now, must go to Paris to replace his dad as the sick King’s attendant, and Helen, seemingly catering the funeral, sobs at this news.

The scenes of abuse remind the audience of the broader problem with the genre of comedy itself.

The plot, then, starts off simply enough: Helen, played by Ruby Bentall, loves Bertram, played by Kit Young. Bertram does not love Helen. Herein lies the problem. Matters are deliciously complicated by Bertram’s confidant and lover, Paroles (William Robinson), whose presence creates what can only be described as a bisexual love triangle, as Paroles flirts with Helen, kisses Bertram and generates further mess in between. It is from the dynamism and fun of this young trio that the production derives its strength.

Helen follows Bertram to France in hopes of healing the King’s anal fistula (true to the script) and gaining Bertram’s favour. Once the King is healed, as a thank you she is granted the choice of any man as her husband. She, unsurprisingly, chooses Bertram, who, unsurprisingly, is disgusted. Marrying her out of deference to the King’s patriarchal authority, he soon leaves for war in France and writes to tell his mother how he has ‘wedded [Helen], not bedded her, and sworn to make the not eternal’. In a separate letter, he tells Helen that if she is able to take his special ring from him and bear a child of his making, ‘only then’, will he see her as his wife, and ‘in such a then, I write a never’. At this point, she follows him, yet again, to Florence. Disguised as a nun, she sets her sights on securing his impossible conditions and therefore his love, and the first half is drawn to a close.

It was the cast’s well-delivered humour that stood out at this point: some slapstick (the King’s fistula-induced waddle and initial meeting of Helen with his tighty-whitey clad arse in the air) and some more sophisticated (the pompous delivery of Paroles’ opening line, ‘are you meditating on virginity?’). Even the misogyny we were warned about in the content guidance was met with laughs, as Bertram refers to his new wife as ‘my clog’ and exchanges frequent eye-rolls with Paroles when Helen is nearby.

The second act starts with more comedy: the men in Florence perform a choreography of war in cinched camouflage costumes with handheld smoke machines to add to the faux dramatics. After a long hard day of dancing and ripping out the wall’s insulation, they collapse on the stage to drink cans of Heineken and comment on each other’s light cosmetic injuries. The performed masculinity was fun to observe, and it only got better as Bertram left the camp to pursue his new maiden, playing the exaggerated role of lover boy to much delight: singing and strumming Daniel Caesar’s ‘Best Part’ much like Ryan Gosling’s Ken.

So far, so funny, it would seem, and I began to question the darkness of the marketing and the necessity of the warnings. And then came the horror: the hard-to-watch humiliation of Paroles and his subsequent ‘break up’ with Bertram, the bed-trick that sees Bertram blindly assaulted as he sleeps with Helen thinking it is Diana and, to top it all off, the uncomfortable and unexplained moment of Lafew pissing on the grave of thought-to-be-dead Helen. All of a sudden, the genre doesn’t fit. In the first half, Helen’s pursuit of and infatuation for Bertram seems sweet, comical and harmless; by the second, her actions have been shown to be what they always were: sexual harassment and assault.

The problem, then, is how to stitch these seams together. The production’s marketing goes for the darker half, presenting prospective audiences with a play of toxic games and manipulation, and a string of content warnings. On the other hand, the director and actors lean more towards the humorous – there was even some pantomime-esque use of the audience – and it is only the final third of the show that makes it clear that All’s Well That Ends Well as a comedy has not aged well at all.

Even in a patriarchal world, it is female violence and manipulation that emerges as the most threatening violence of all.

The scenes of abuse remind the audience of the broader problem with the genre of comedy itself. After the laughter of the first two thirds of the show has trailed away, the production starts to question whether the comedy was ever funny at all. At first, we laughed at the tragedy of watching a woman’s personality wilt for a somewhat haughty and dismissive man, and at her futile attempts to secure his love and attention. By the end of the play, her infatuation is shown to be harmful: Bertram’s rejection of Helen, snobbish as it may be, was an exercise of his right to consent, and the audience – as well as the production – are confronted as to why they laughed in the first place. The final scene makes that all too clear: Helen stalks a sobbing Bertram in a circle around the stage, her wedding dress costume no longer a joke.

And yet, what stood out most in this performance was the humour, not the darkness. Kit Young, Ruby Bentall and William Robinson offered the ridiculousness and energy of their characters with wit and charm, and were able also to match the change of tone towards the end. Kwami Odoom and Adam Wadsworth deserve mention as military men Dumaine and Morgan, with Dumaine in particular delivering one of the best lines of the show, an excellent expression of disbelief at Paroles’ simultaneous self-awareness and insincerity: ‘Is it possible he should know what he is and be it?’ Emilio Doorgasingh and Siobhan Redmond stood out, too, for their roles as the elusive and bitter Lafew and the elegant and warm Countess, respectively.

The triumph of All’s Well That Ends Well is its youthful and outlandish humour, and its moments of discomfort felt, for me at least, as an intentional confrontation of what staging a Shakespearean comedy is: an exercise in balancing the comedy of the clownish fools with the subtlety of more serious social commentary. Chelsea Walker’s direction seems to achieve this and presents an accurate representation of the ways in which the generic marker of comedy obscures darker works at play. We are left with a perverse happy ending, tonally not dissimilar to the insecure, metapoetics of The Tempest’s Prospero, or, to use a more contemporary reference point, the uncomfortable reunion at the end of Gone Girl. An ending where even in a patriarchal world, it is female violence and manipulation that emerges as the most threatening violence of all.

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Zadie Loft is a writer from Suffolk, now living in London. After reading Classics at Cambridge, she studied Creative Writing at Oxford and is represented by Becky Percival at United Agents. She works as the Marketing and Editorial Assistant at The London Magazine.

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