All's Well Trailers

The first trailer, for the National Theatre Live, gave a very interesting advertisement for All's Well That Ends Well. The most glaring thing to me about the trailer, is that the entire trailer seems unwilling to admit that All's Well is the performance they're showing. The name is never actually said, only listed in the last ten seconds of the ad, and the ad begins by talking about all the millions of people that loved the play the National Theatre had previously shown. When I think about this, I can't help but think about our class discussion about how unpopular All's Well is compared to other Shakespeare plays. In terms of the content the trailer showed of the play (which I'm forced to assume was of All's Well because they never actually say it is) everything seemed extremely fantastical. I think at one point the king was dancing with what looked like the Countess, and there might have been a romantic moonlight kiss between Helena and Bertram, even though Bertram says about Helena in Act 5 right before the happy ending of the play,"I cannot love her, nor will strive to do't". I'm not sure how I felt about this interpretation, because on one hand the story is very unsettling and not really like something you would want to make a spectacle. But on the other hand, the story definitely mirrors the original classic fairy tales where everything is kind of messed up but everything looks good. There's no need to see any lines other than the final lines by the king to see the application of this double sided issue, "All yet seems well ; and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet." This reinforces the fairy tailish notion that things don't really look 100% right, but it seems happy at the end so the audience can just roll with it.