SOURCE: Marks, Peter. Review of All's Well That Ends Well. Washington Post (6 November 2003): C4.

In the following review of director Richard Clifford's 2003 staging of All's Well That Ends Well at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., Marks finds the production conventional, drab, and lifeless.

Even on the most accommodating of slopes, All's Well That Ends Well would be rough sledding. Perverse is not too strong a term for the vein in which Shakespeare is working in this peculiar “comedy” about a woman creepily pursuing a snooty punk of a nobleman who can barely stand the sight of her.

Over the years, literary critics have taken up the cause of this rarely performed piece as a small, misunderstood gem. George Bernard Shaw thought its spirited heroine, Helena, was a prototype for Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House, and other analysts have obsessively puzzled over the play's eccentric plots...