All's Well That Ends Well, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - Shakespeare at his least likeable

"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly.

So too is the play of the same name, a soi disant "problem play", Shakespeare at his more mean-spirited, sometimes giving the impression of indulging in a bit of score-settling. It’s less performed than even slaughter-fests like Macbeth as a result. The key question for a punter is whether it’s worth swallowing all that bile for the intrigue of its ethical questions, its subversive gender and class relations and its cruel humour. 

We open on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s beautiful, even Christmassy, candles and its harsh, pew-like seats - it’s not the last contradiction of the evening. Helen (Ruby Bentall, pictured right), a maid as well as a maiden, is glaring at Bertram (Kit Young), the posh-boy son of a countess, who looks on her, and later speaks to her, with barely concealed contempt. Soon she’s in (crocodile) tears, always with one eye on currying sympathy from his mother (Siobhan Redmond, displaying the only decency we’ll see all night), before swigging the dregs of the cognac and revealing herself a resourceful woman indeed, blessed with plenty of the cojones the men are lacking.

Gambling, literally, her life, she uses her late father’s apothecary’s potions to cure the King, then exercises her reward in naming her husband (that’s you-know-who), but, horrified at a match with a low-born woman, Bertram’s for war in Italy, the marriage left unconsummated. But she’s for chasing him, in disguise of course, with the aim of getting pregnant with his child, acquiring his ring and, in consequence, sealing the deal.   

Young’s line readings are as good as I’ve heard this year, bringing out the blank verse alongside Bertram’s disdain for those socially beneath his station and for women in general. He’s an attractive person – he has to be in order to be the object of Helen’s desire, for she is no fool – but there’s an immature laddishness with a side-order of narcissism that makes him if not quite repellent, then certainly a bit of a wrong-un. Wealth and entitlement has a habit of doing that to young men – and they don’t all grow out of it.

In Chelsea Walker’s new production, there’s something else too. There’s an undertow of sexual desire that pulls his friend, the hapless soldier Parolles (William Robinson), to his commanding officer, that is, at least partially, returned by Bertram. If we hadn’t guessed already, it hints at another reason for his rejection of his marital obligations. Having the two men kiss on stage does thumb the nose at 400 years of gay suppression in staging Shakespeare, but it also lands like listening to someone explain their joke – as ever, exposition best left undone.   

Bentall catches something of Helen’s ambiguity – she’s not just a golddigger, she really is besotted as only teenage girls can be. But she’s manipulative in her exercise of the, surely by 2024, infamous bed-trick. Her swapping out for Diana (a well-judged Georgia-Mae Myers, virginal, but aware that sex for a woman of her rank is transactional as much as romantic) to fool Bertram into impregnating her and not his latest conquest, is, these days, rape. She gets to wear the shit-eating grin when she traps her man once and for all, but where do our sympathies lie? 

Maybe with Parolles, who’s a bit of an egotist and hardly a warm personality, but his hazing at the hands of his soldier colleagues is wildly over the top in its proportionality. Laughing at someone’s willingness to say anything, blindfolded and faced with a mock-execution, may have gone down well 400 years ago, but there were bear-baiting pits just round the corner from The Globe then too.

The play is, as it must be, a ball of contradictions that barrels over the fourth wall. It’s funny, complex and compelling, but it feels almost too anachronistic to stage as uncomplicatedly as this. That’s no plea for yet more extensive trigger warnings, just a reflection on whether its relentless misanthropy would have consigned it to its historical context were its author another playwright. 

But, especially at this venue, barring The Bard isn’t really an option.          

• All's Well That Ends Well at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare's Globe until 4 January 
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk