All’s Well That Ends Well – Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Chelsea Walker

When we first see orphaned Helen (Ruby Bentall), she’s serving drinks and crying. Her tears, she later tells the audience, are not prompted by her father’s death. She is weeping with unrequited passion for Bertram, who is leaving home. Bertram (a brilliantly nuanced Kit Young) is the handsome young Count of Roussillon in whose household she grew up. He scarcely looks in her direction. Helen follows him to the French court in a do-or-die attempt to win him.

She cures the sick French king, who rewards her with a husband of her choice from among his men. “Thou hast power to choose, and they none to forsake,” the king tells her in an electrifying scene. Shakespeare may have lifted the plot from Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron, but the play’s explorations of control, cruelty and consent are strikingly contemporary. All’s Well That Ends Well is often grouped with plays like Measure for Measure as a problem play – a comedy in which humour and lightness are fraught with darker ethical ambiguities. Traditionally less frequently staged than more straightforward comedies, these plays are becoming more popular as definitions of authority, sexuality and gender are challenged.

This thought-provoking production certainly problematises the play’s complex power dynamics. In this version, snappily directed by Chelsea Walker, the audience soon realises that Bertram is in a relationship with his companion, Paroles (a fiercely mercurial William Robinson). It’s an interpretation that makes sense of some moments in the text. Paroles even calls him “sweet heart” in one scene and laments: “A young man married is a man that’s marred.” And if Bertram already has a boyfriend, he might well be reluctant to be forced into marrying Helen. Later scenes make clear Bertram is both bisexual and happy to play the field. He is just not that into Helen, not least because he sees her as his social inferior.

It’s a minimalist staging, where occasional props, like Helen’s tray of glasses, are powerfully deployed. Costume changes, too, are crucial in signposting the fast-moving story. The king staggers in, wearing stained Y-fronts, sagging socks and dishevelled cardigan, only to reappear in a suit once swiftly cured. Designers Megan Rarity and Rosanna Vize shed Shakespearean trappings in favour of contemporary chic. The dress code is black with funereal dark glasses in mourning Roussillon, where Siobhán Redmond is an authoritative countess. There are shades of coral, peach and ochre in Paris and Florence as the play’s action shifts. The soldiers wear dark modern uniforms, while Helen spends much of the play in an off-the-shoulder wedding dress when she’s not cosplaying a pilgrim nun with scarlet lipstick and matching suitcase.

Simon Slater’s music is genius. Unsettling operatic notes spiral into high-pitched borderline screams. It quickly builds or calms suspense. The musical effects, directed by Louise Duggan, are reminiscent of similarly disturbing soundtracks for film and TV, like the theme tunes to White Lotus and Utopia. Dressed in gold, soprano Angela Hicks sings regally from the balcony above the stage. Below her, the set disintegrates as if losing its stuffing.

This is a clever, provocative production. It grapples with interpersonal questions that feel no simpler today than they did to Shakespeare, though perhaps for different reasons. Is Helen an empowered young woman, understandably determined to have agency in a patriarchal world, or an obsessive stalker, pursuing and coercing an unwilling partner? Is Paroles a coward and traitor or a young man trying to be himself despite society’s sniggering homophobia? And Bertram? Victim, snob or thoughtless seducer? The audience is forced to re-evaluate the characters more than once during an unflagging two-hour canter through this engaging tour de force.

“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” says one character towards the end of the play. Fleshing out this sense of moral and emotional complexity is both commendable and frustrating. If we can’t cheer on at least one of the protagonists, who can we sympathise with? The dilemmas are made even thornier in the intimate candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where proximity leaves the actors nowhere to hide. But, the ensemble’s considerable skills are more than a match for both the challenging space and Shakespeare’s enigmatic text.

Runs until 4 January 2025