Three Cheers and a Kowtow

By RICHARD CORLISS

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL by William Shakespeare

"Brush up your Shakespeare," sang a pair of rogues in Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, "and they'll all kowtow." As master artificer of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, Director Trevor Nunn has applied brush, tweezers, rouge and style to this dowager of a "problem play." He has outfitted her in the decorous billows and sashes of Edwardian England, taught her to sing and dance, sent her on a grand tour of Belle Epoque France and war-weary Italy. Now, fresh from triumphs in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, this radiant creature has come to charm Broadway for 16 weeks. Three cheers and a kowtow are in order.

The play has always needed sprucing up, from the moment Shakespeare used the motley of farce to clothe his meditation on "class"--on the battle in every society between rank and value, between nobility in title and nobility of the soul. Helena (Harriet Walter), a physician's daughter living in the care of the Countess of Rossillion (Margaret Tyzack), is desperately in love with the Countess's son Bertram (Philip Franks); but Bertram, influenced by the pompous Captain Parolles (Stephen Moore), refuses to love a woman of low station, especially when forced into marriage with her. Deception and humiliation bring Parolles to his knees and Bertram, ultimately, to his senses.

Evidence suggests that All's Well lay underappreciated and unproduced in the First Folio for more than a century. The reasons are not hard to guess. Shakespeare gave his play the structure but not the spirit of a romance, and gave the leading female characters most of the good lines and gracious impulses. Commentators from Coleridge to Shaw have praised Helena and the Countess as among the "loveliest" and "most charming" of Shakespeare's heroines, while dismissing Bertram and Parolles as unworthy of the ladies' or our interest. By Act V, Helena's passion for her unrequiting snob has become an act of beatific willfulness and the stuff of gaslight melodrama.

Nunn demonstrates, as he did in his productions of Nicholas Nickleby and Cats, that he is a showman-scholar who can infuse the most daunting of projects with whirlwind grandeur. Under John Gunter's airy greenhouse of a set, All's Well teems with musical-comedy bustle: dashing cadets in aviator goggles, marching bands and sultry chanteuses, and a Florence railway station full of Nunn's beloved smoke effects. But there is gravity here as well as buoyancy. A mood of Chekhovian wistfulness is set at the start with the valse triste of a young couple fated to part, and Nunn spends the next 31 1/4 hours indicating that Bertram and Helena may never be suited to each other, even at the end. Bertram has surrendered, but with noblesse oblige; Helena has won her man, but perhaps not his love.

There are some lovely performances. Stephen Moore's Parolles is a Falstaff in everything but girth and sympathy; Margaret Tyzack is a sweetly brooding auntie of a Countess; John Franklyn-Robbins, as the King of France, is a regal master of ceremonies. While Harriet Walter shows intimations of a major talent, her Helena is a festival of quivering mannerisms, a sprightly suffragette. Through the actors, and occasionally in spite of the text, Nunn has devised an elegant evening on the need to be loved and the danger of being too greatly loved. --By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.