A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN and AN IDEAL HUSBAND have led inexorably to the climax of the season, his magnificent comedy THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. Sadly the production sits very shakily on the top of the others' achievements. The play has been dazzling audiences since 1895 and will continue to do so... but through no thanks to director Michael Fentiman who imposes himself between the glorious words and the audience from the start.
EARNEST is the blistering, blissful apex of Wilde's career in all possible ways; the pure distilled joy of his invention, his previously Melodramatic plots are here whipped into a creamy souffle of confused identities and his seven main characters confound and delight with every whiplash line of epigrammatic pleasure. It is impossible to stage any play by Oscar Wilde without seeing it refracted through the cut-glass shards of his downfall, in which EARNEST sits as an innocent bystander.
Wilde's state of mind during it's writing is reflected in the what-the-eye-doesn't see engine of it's plot - he wrote the play while holidaying with his wife Constance and his children in Worthing (which explains the town's importance in the play) but as soon as they left, in moved Lord Alfred Douglas. It turned out to be yet another unhappy experience: Wilde nursed Douglas through a sudden bout of influenza but when he himself became sick, Douglas left him to fend for himself. Six months after it's initial writing, it was premiered at the St James' Theatre and had been rewritten and reduced from four acts to three.
The successful opening night was marred by the threat of Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who intended to disrupt the curtain call so Wilde had the management rescind his ticket and bar him from the premises but four days later he left the infamous calling card at Wilde's club, the Albermarle, calling Wilde a sodomite. Wilde sued... and the rest is sad history. Sir George Alexander, manager of the St. James' Theatre and the original Jack Worthing, took Wilde's name off the posters to try and weather the storm but eventually closed the play after 86 performances.
But EARNEST continued to delight audiences - albeit on small tours and 'fringe' performances while Oscar languished in prison - and two years after his death in 1900, George Alexander revived it at the St James'. Since then the play has been revived countless times and is now rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest comedies in the English language, not least because of Anthony Asquith's glorious 1952 film with the titanic performances of Edith Evans, Michael Redgrave, Michael Dennison, Joan Greenwood, Dorothy Tutin, Margaret Rutherford and Miles Malleson.
All the film cast's souls will rest easy knowing their hold on the roles are still firm. As I said Michael Fentiman's directorial choices continually butt in to the production; they cannot really stop the glory of the words but his cheapening of the characters begins to irk after a while. The sooner Fentiman understands that the audience are there for the play, not his ideas around it, the better. It's too late for EARNEST however so we shall press on.
It's a production where the women come out on top but only just. Sophie Thompson's comedic experience is on full display as she swoops and honks her way through Lady Bracknell's dazzling lines but has a touch of humanity about her so the character is less of a gorgon than usual. Pippa Nixon seems to take her lead from Sophie, her Gwendolen is definitely her mother's daughter with her imperious air and directness. Fiona Button plays Cecily Cardew with an equal boldness so their second act confrontation was a trifle overpowering - it didn't help that Fentiman has them stuffing each others mouths with the bread and butter. No, I don't know either. Stella Gonet was off so we saw her understudy Alana Ramsey as Miss Prism and she was ok.
So to the men... Jeremy Swift was fairly anonymous as Canon Chasuble, just... nothing there. Mchael Fentiman's heavy-handed approach to the play was all over the actors playing Jack and Algernon: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (a name to change away from) actually managed to make some impression as Jack especially in the 'interview' scene with Lady Bracknell but in the second half, as the complications and coincidences crash head-on, Fentiman has directed him to play it like Daffy Duck at his most uncontrolled. I felt sorry for the actor...
The Algernon of Fehinti Balogun was just a mess, he appears to have appeared in several off-west end roles - including ensemble work in Glenda Jackson's KING LEAR - so what on earth made Fentiman think he could carry this lead role in his first proper West End play? I am sure he is capable of acting but high comedy is certainly not his forte: instead of pitching his lines up and out, he blotted them as he gabbled their delivery. It says a lot about the production that the most memorable male performance is Geoffrey Freshwater's butler Lane in the opening scene.
And of course, as it's 2018, Fentiman ramps up the subtext, as if it really needs to be spelled out in neon letters instead of leaving it to bubble along in the background. So we have Algernon absurdly snogging Lane his manservant and doing bizarre nose-rubbing with Jack when they meet in Jack's country house while Gwendolen acts like she has a vibrator up her skirts at the mere thought of marrying Jack aka Ernest. It's all so reductive and does Wilde's masterpiece a serious disservice.
That there is still fun to be had is a tribute to the indestructible magic of the play. It's just a shame that Classic Spring's excellent season ends with such a mis-firing production. One wonders who Dromgoole might go for a possible second season, there are plenty to choose from but would they be commercial enough? The obvious choices almost cancel themselves out by being well-catered for such as Shaw, Chekhov, Rattigan, Orton, Pinter and O'Neill so a less obvious choice might be interesting.
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