A review by livrad
All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare

3.0

I appreciated the witty banter in this play, though the character development read as if there were sections lost to history (which there very well could be). While modern readers/audiences may feel uncomfortable around the moral quandary of consent when Helena tricks Bertram into sleeping with her (things written 400+ years ago probably don’t need spoiler alerts), I’m sure period audiences found this bawdy trickery uproariously funny. What threw this one off for me was how stunted the ending was. It was like the play just stopped, and Shakespeare decided to pop on a wedding just to fit within the format of comedy. Bertram has to make such an abrupt emotional shift in this last scene, that the moment must truly deserve to be seen on stage, just to see how the actor approaches it to make it in anyway believable.