I will try other local libraries for the BBC version. It wasn’t in my usual one.

The weakness was the inadequacy of the actors playing the leading roles (particularly Helena). Several times, I’ve seen Renaissance plays let down by young performers speaking very slowly and very loudly, as if their laboured over-insistence on vocal clarity is compensating for a deficiency in understanding of the lines they’re speaking. Bertram was played very much as the arrogant callow brat – fair enough, but I think you need an element of human sympathy there to contrast with the sometimes almost inhuman virtue of the heroine. A fine balance: Bertram can’t simply be a straightforward shit, as the situation would be rendered wholly implausible and unengaging; the actor, therefore, has to aim for a rounded, ‘realistic’ characterisation (though the aim can’t be too square, of course; it’s Shakespeare, not Chekhov). At the same time, in Helena’s case, the slightest whiff of an attempt at psychological realism would be disastrous because her role would make a nonsense of it. Tricky parts; perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on the players.

AOG: I read your review after posting mine, and it seems we liked opposite parts – you favoured Acts 1 and 2. I need to go back and read them again; I found them in the main uninteresting, and without good characters; and was put off by the “comic” sections. Maybe they fit in better having read the whole play (I noticed, flicking back, the section between Helena and Parolles re virginity might well be of some importance).

What you say about Helena is interesting too: she does appear to enchant all the other characters in the play, except the one she wants to enchant. Perhaps she might be played as an otherworldly presence. And the stuff about fairy-tales, of course.

Still had no sympathy for Bertram though.