All's well with Judi

Thanks to Dame Judi Dench's extraordinary pulling-power at the boxoffice, this little-known Shakespeare problem comedy has been rushed down to London from Stratford-upon-Avon to play in the West End for the first time in modern theatrical history.

Gregory Doran's light-hearted, production of All's Well for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which Dame Judi endearingly plays a widowed French countess half out of love with life, emerges as both fairytale romance and romp. It is successfully slanted to amuse, move and delight traditionalist audiences, eager for Shakespearean comedy in handsome stage settings.

Stephen Brimson Lewis's exquisitely beautiful black panels, with sketches of bare, wintry trees in a rural landscape set the sombre, elegaic scene. Chandeliers descend to decorate the French king's court. A cello plaintively plays.

From this starting point, Claudie Blakley's winsome though vulnerable Helena, who wears her aching heart on her sleeve, embarks on an obsessive quest to marry the countess's uninterested son. She will triumph by hook or by crook, or bit of both, and finally appears like Hermione in The Winter's Tale, as if back from the dead.

Dame Judi's imposing, openhearted grande dame communicates a powerful sense of melancholic aloofness from the troubles of the world, despite concern for her ward, Helena. And she speaks complex Shakespeare with a naturalness, ease and spontaneity quite unmatched by any other member of the company.

Yet Doran's take upon All's Well still strikes me as being an elegant, whitewash job on a dark Shakespeare comedy. The problem

of the play has to do with how we regard Helena, who might today be regarded as something of a sexual stalker, even though she is possessed by genuine passion.

She achieves Bertram's hand in marriage though not his unwilling body, on the orders of Gary Waldhorn's imposing king of France, who forcibly hands the young man over as if he were disposable goods. She then tricks him into sex and marital commitment by little less than a sting.

"All yet seems well," says the king in the finale, as Jamie Glover's irritatingly bland Bertram is left caught in the midst of a forced marriage and at a small distance from the girl who used her guiles to trap him. But the king's cautious note of doubt - that reference to "seems" - is not echoed by Glover's Bertram. He gives two small smiles as if, sentimentally, to indicate his battle to avoid Helena was unnecessary and that marital happiness loomed ahead. This sweetening of the problematic conclusion is typical of a Jacobean-dress production that remains too jocular about the strange sex-war battle between Helena and icily detached, supercilious Bertram.

In this situation, it is not surprising that Guy Henry's lovely, high-camp comedy performance as a Falstaffian Parolles, who gladly goes off to the wars with Bertram, should be so outstanding.