Abstract
Productions of All's Well That Ends Well have typically tackled its disturbing sexual, generational and class politics by locating the play in historical or fairy tale settings. Blanche McIntyre instead explores a contemporary world saturated by the proliferating digital technologies of social media and the fantasies its multiple screens project and promote to Gen Z. A metal canopy resembling an inverted satellite dish indicates France, turning into a military tent for war-torn Florence, while projections of Douglas O’Connell's video design of mocked-up apps, smartphone footage, video games, drone screens, and heart shaped graphics constantly pop up as background. The digital devices always in the hands of the ‘rude boys’ (3.2.82) of the court, distracting them from the power and ‘privilege of antiquity’ (2.3.210) embodied in the aging autocratic King (Bruce Alexander), become toxic tools during downtime on the battlefield. When a Rambo-esque, muscle-suited Paroles (Jamie Wilkes) boasts he will recover his D-RUM drone his fellow soldiers expose him as a braggart and coward through digital captures and a mock execution followed by the inevitable Twitter pile-on. Rosie Sheehy's Helen ‘idolatrous fancy’ (1.1.97) turns her into a self-influencer, determined to shape the world to her own liking, while Bertram (Benjamin Westerby) takes selfies in the militia gear made familiar from TV coverage of the Ukraine conflict.
Inspired by a production that explicitly explores how ‘media and their platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on – also function as stages; places for people to construct and cultivate identities to presented audiences, both real and imagined’ screens multiply - and split – in the screen adaptation. Not designed for live broadcast to cinema but instead edited over 12 weeks from footage from two performances, it was shot in three days by a small film unit, on approximately half the budget of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) ‘Live from Stratford-upon-Avon’ recordings produced by John Wyver over the last decade. Together with his co-directors McIntyre, Hayley Pepler, and photographer and editor Todd MacDonald, Wyver sets out to demonstrate how ‘awareness and exploration of split screens, and their broad use and acceptance across lockdown performance, has offered a challenge to the previously dominant conventions of sequentially edited full-frame presentation’ of stage productions (Wyver 39).
For much of the adaptation sequences of footage shot in the style familiar from cinematic livecasts are punctuated by reedited frames of varying ratios and numbers, set on backgrounds abstracted from the patterns and colours of the stage set. The first split-screen, showing Bertram and his mother and Lafeu (Simon Coates) in two separate frames, does not simply allow the viewer to compare reactions in a way that continuity editing often precludes. Accompanying Bertram's bitter lines about wardship and subjection (1.1.5–6), it underlines the generational divide, driven by unequal power, that is one of the play's concerns. Additional footage was created by a range of camera technologies, both diegetic and non-diegetic. The video projections in the background on stage come into sharper thematic focus and relevance when occupying half the screen. Graphics introduce locations, and letters and Lavatch's songs unroll on the screen like text messages while the techno club scene in which Helen and Diana (Olivia Onyehara) change places for the bed-trick becomes even more psychedelically surreal through post-production grading and framing.
During lockdown while theatres were closed several productions were broadcast on stage with no audience present, including the RSC's The Winter's Tale that premiered on BBC4 in April 2021 as part of the Corporation's ‘virtual theatre festival’ Lights Up. This perhaps informed the decision to film certain key, especially intimate, scenes in a similar way. The subtle acoustic differences between a scene played before a full house and spoken in a virtually empty auditorium – differences also to do with how the actors pitch their performances to each other and to the cameras – give added intensity to the ‘standard’ mode filming of the scenes in which the Countess (Claire Benedict) probes Helen's feelings for her son and the offer of a cure is made to the King. Helen's first two soliloquies, filmed in close-up at the bottom of the Swan Theatre staircase, echo her outsider status by placing her beyond the world of the play. The effect was stylistically reminiscent of the Guardian's Shakespeare Solos series of short films of speeches from the plays produced in 2016 as part of celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death. These were relaunched in lockdown in April 2020 as ‘All the World's a Stage’ in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe's ‘Love in Isolation’ project in April 2020, when the films were remixed to include members of the public speaking Shakespeare's lines at home in quarantine. Sheehy's direct-to-camera self-questioning is resonant with a sense of isolation, interiority and steely determination while leaving opaque exactly what drives her ‘ambitious love’ (3.4.5) for Bertram.
Live broadcasts of performance usually take care to keep cameras invisible on screen to preserve an illusion of unmediated access and immediacy. The cameras and their images that were already an important part of the production opened the way to make audience members and actors part of the film crew and incorporate their captures into the final edited recording. The smartphones trained on Paroles from different seats in the stalls and occasionally glimpsed on screen not only capture Wilkes's acting from shifting perspectives, distancing it from how it appears in the ‘standard’ mode of filming, but also invoke the widespread taboo against the use of phones during a performance, the breaking of which generates what Kirsty Sedgman has identified as ‘bristling hostility’, signalling ‘both an ethical urge to be considerate of others, and a knee-jerk rejection of distractions that fails to consider others’ (Sedgman). This footage thus interrogates rather than simply represents, implicating the audience in the digital surveillance depicted on stage. The gulling scene's bodycams are employed with equal self-reflexivity. Weapons and hands appear untidily in the frames and the deliberate messiness of odd angles and sudden movements mirrors the disorientation inflicted on a blindfolded Paroles. Elsewhere the camera's presence draws the audience closer inside the action. In 2.3 in which Helen makes her public choice of husband a handheld camera operated by MacDonald enters with her from backstage, providing a viewpoint the theatre audience never normally sees. In the trial scene at the end of the play, the way the camera moves reflects the characters’ confusion as the denouement unfolds and the cameraman's exit with the rest of the cast leaves Helen and Bertram alone facing each other in separate frames, in an image that poignantly recalls the lovers physically distanced by a screen in the Old Vic's lockdown broadcasts of Lungs (Wyver 39–40), though here the final edit places them in the same frame but still apart.
Heidi Lucja Liedke defines Covidian theatre as ‘plays which, in the wake of social distancing and lockdowns, explicitly address audiences at home and/or use various means to activate the pandemic frame’ (Liedke). Although filmed and screened after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, All's Well That Ends Well can be viewed as an intrinsically ‘post-Covidian’ adaptation, framed by the filmic strategies that came to prominence during that period, and deliberately troubling the relationship between the conventions of cinematic live broadcasts and post-production mediation. Essentially designed for small screens and personal viewing online, on DVD, or on television, the latter's domestic ‘particularities of screens’ were manifest in the way the Sky broadcast not only cut the production to accommodate advertising but omitted a rude gesture and mouthed insult by Paroles, doubtless in acknowledgment of its scheduling before the notional British broadcasting ‘watershed’ of 9:00 p.m. as well as the likelihood of schools recording the broadcast for their digital archives.
Peter Brook once speculated that multi-screen filming of Shakespeare might open a ‘range of endless possible permutations’ that could free filmed performance from being simply a ‘cramped and constipated statement’. This All's Well adaptation marks a thoughtful and successful attempt to carry forward Brook's vision beyond the cinematic into the digital era, rigorously exploring a developing filmic grammar influenced by a pandemic in which screens of all kinds increasingly dominated our lives.
Screen captures from the Sky Arts broadcast of All's Well That Ends Well, Royal Shakespeare Company.