This problem play completes the RSC’s 10-year project to perform and record 34 works for posterity. It is perfectly suited to its director, Blanche McIntyre, who has notched up The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure in recent years and again proves her knack for navigating the tricky plays.
At its centre is a romance in which one of Shakespeare’s women, unusually, calls the shots. Helena (Rosie Sheehy) fixes her gaze on Bertram (Benjamin Westerby) and turns the object of her obsession into a trophy husband after winning a bargain with the ailing King of France (Bruce Alexander): that she can cure him in exchange for a marriage. Bertram regards her as a “poor physician’s daughter” and a detested wifely “club” until he is tricked into submission in the play’s rather forced happy ending.
Every performance in this fine cast brings energy and conviction to a sometimes unconvincing drama. Sheehy stands apart though, a force to be reckoned with from her obsessive schoolgirl zeal at the start (she appears in uniform) to the pulsating rave party in which she poses as Bertram’s love interest, Diana (Olivia Onyehara). For Shakespeare’s day, the character of Helena is nothing short of radical: she commands the stage with an unabashed ambition and open sexual yearning redolent of traditional male leading parts. But it is still dramatically frustrating that Bertram remains as sketchily drawn as most of Shakespeare’s paper-thin women.
The subplot featuring Bertram’s slippery, self-serving follower Parolles (Jamie Wilkes), is well executed, though at times it threatens to dominate and imbalance the plot. Wilkes is a comic wonder, eking out every laugh from his lines and eliciting our compassion after the ruse by the lords to expose his disloyalty and cowardliness. Rather like Malvolio’s gulling, it feels like a cruel trick indeed.
Robert Innes Hopkins’ set, bare at the front with a cage-like structure at the back, is a strange creation. And with the production set in the present, there is a slightly overexcited use of Instagram images and a brief gaming scene that seems tacked on, while mobile phones are waved around like semaphores.
Although unsubtle, it does perhaps say something about Gen-Z love and the way in which virtual imagery fuels romantic fixations to give them a bubblegum vapidity: in Douglas O’Connell’s video design, emoticon love hearts rise out of the projections over and over again.
But this play’s problematic questions remain writ large: is Helena a Shakespearean feminist prototype, not only determining her fate but moving heaven and earth to control Bertram’s? Or is she a manipulative villain bent on entrapment? Does Bertram feel homosexual love for Parolles, as McIntyre’s production briefly suggests? And is his final capitulation in earnest? It seems so here but he could just as well be putting on a fake smile for the king.
The closing ambiguity is left hanging and takes away from any real romantic resolution. Even McIntyre can’t stop this play from feeling like a tasty meal, half served.
At Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford upon Avon, until 8 October
