IN A fit of unaccustomed sentimentality, customary perversity, or both, Shaw wrote that Shakespeare’s Countess of Rossillion, who glides through All’s Well like an elegantly ageing swan, was “the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written”. And though the play is seldom performed, the character has attracted the RSC’s finest: Peggy Ashcroft, Barbara Jefford, and now Judi Dench, returning to a company in mortal need of her talent.

And, yes, it’s a lovely performance: wise, warm, generous, tough, forgiving, grieving at times, yet always oddly serene. If Dame Judi can find all that in the Countess, maybe Shaw was right. Yet there’s something about the Countess, and All’s Well itself, that discomforts audiences. Maybe that’s why it’s often categorised as a “problem play”. All’s well, and all’s not quite well.

The Countess’s “gentlewoman” Helena cures the French king of a fistula that, as Gary Waldhorn plays the part, has reduced him to a moaning shade. So he gives her the reward she requests, which is the hand of Rossillion’s son, Bertram. The trouble is that the boy doesn’t want her and only agrees to the marriage because he’s threatened with royal nemesis. When he deserts his wife for the French army, everyone thinks he’s behaved badly, including his mother, who seems more of a parent to Helena than to him.

If some upper-crust valetudinarian in Casualty forced her son to wed a nurse or paramedic, we’d hope she’d end up in a straitjacket. But maybe I wouldn’t have felt that way at the Swan if Jamie Glover’s Bertram were more the snobbish pup others think him. Here, the character seems a decent youth keen to make his own way in the world. Glover plays Bertram from Bertram’s point of view — and we sympathise with him perhaps more than we should.

The confusion is increased by Claudie Blakley’s Helena, who is gawkily sweet but not the irresistible beauty everyone claims, and by Guy Henry’s Parolles, the fellow-officer who misleads Bertram rather as Falstaff does Prince Hal. Henry isn’t at all the braggart soldier of theatrical tradition, but an insecure, forlornly self-knowing figure who acquires a little belated dignity when his pretensions are exposed and his cowardice punished.

Again, these are good, intelligent performances but they complicate our sympathies more than the preposterously romantic plot demands. Myself, I’ll remember Gregory Doran’s lucid, sensitive production mainly for Dame Judi. Towards the end she sees Helena, whom she’d thought dead. All she does is thrust out her palms a little. How many actresses could do virtually nothing — and radiate such welcome and love?

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