Director Max Webster must be congratulated on achieving the impossible. He has incontrovertibly wrecked the greatest comedy in the English language by stamping on Wilde’s wit with pink leather jackboots and supplanting high comedy and sparkling dialogue with panto vulgarity.
It has transferred from the National Theatre with a new cast and the big draw here is Stephen Fry’s drag act as Lady Bracknell. Fry is not the only man to play Bracknell – David Suchet, Geoffrey Rush and Giles Brandreth among others got there before him – but it’s still a kick in the face of every veteran actress waiting in the wings for an opportunity such as this.
This multi-diverse production is absurd, from the casting all the way down to the bone. Jack (Nathan Stewart-Barrett) and Algy (Olly Alexander) are transparently as queer as folk, which makes their courting of Cecily (Jessica Whitehurst) and Gwendolyn (Kitty Hawthorne) rather bewildering, even if they were bisexual. Not that it matters in a production that throws logic out of the window and brings in a gay orgy, a lesbian flirtation between the two girls and a concluding dance sequence with the entire cast dressed as flowers, from daffodils to pansies.
Winks and nods to audience members steer it further into panto territory which would be fine if the gestural humour matched Wilde’s priceless wit. But it doesn’t. It trivialises the entire purpose of the play and Wilde’s intentions – to lampoon the society of which he was both member and outsider.
The argument that Wilde was constrained by Victorian moral hypocrisy to codify his language and relationships is all well and good but the result was a masterpiece of British theatre that is unequalled. To apply the notion that this is how Wilde would really have wanted to see it is not just disrespectful but arrogant.
Most of the lines are delivered like kettlebells, more flat Sprite than Perrier-Jouët and accompanied by explanatory gestures just in case we don’t get the joke. Only Fry has the right comic timing to deliver the lines, and even he is hampered by the overburdened pace and clunkiness of the direction. His greatest moments are the handbag scene and the conclusion in which he is given his head, so to speak.
Among the worst offenders are Whitehurst and Hawthorne, who need to go back to drama school to learn the value of underplaying, and Stewart-Barrett who flings himself around the stage while shrieking like a banshee. Aside from Fry, only Hugh Dennis as Canon Chasuble maintains his cool and holds a torch for Wilde. But when actor Hayley Carmichael in the smallest roles, doubling as servants Lane and Mannering, gets the biggest laughs and steals every scene in a performance that has nothing to do with Wilde, you know something is terribly wrong.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST AT THE NOEL COWARD THEATRE TO JANUARY 10