Sir Robert Chiltern is a high-flying member of the Government, married to a woman who holds the view - Wilde's young wives always initially hold dogmatic views on things - that if you have done wrong you should be punished. What Gertrude Chiltern doesn't know is that her husband's whole standing in society is based on a shady secret - he gave a Baron news that the Government were going to back the building of the Suez Canal a few days before it was announced, giving the Baron time to invest in the deal and make himself a fortune. The Baron's financial recompense to Chiltern bankrolled his start in political life. Oh and by the by, how remarkable that Oscar should hit on the Suez Canal as a possible source of Government embarrassment.
At a soiree given by the Chilterns, their friend Lady Markby arrives with the glamorous but mysterious Mrs Cheeverly, who reveals to Chiltern that she was the late Baron's former lover and has in her possession Chiltern's incriminating Suez letter. Her price for silence is that Chiltern puts pressure on the Government to push through a similar canal deal in Argentina which Cheeverly and her friends have invested in but which Chiltern knows is doomed to failure. Mrs Cheeverly was a contemporary of Gertrude's at school and they always despised each other, which is another reason for her to wreak havoc on the couple.
Chiltern capitulates but when Mrs Cheeverly, in a row with Gertrude, reveals the secret to her, Gertrude is appalled that her "Ideal Husband" has broken the law. Gertrude demands that he admits his wrongdoing even though it will ruin them. In desperation, Robert confides to his best friend, the pleasure-loving Lord Goring, his quandary but Goring insists he keeps quiet and allow him to see to Mrs Cheeverly, whom he was once engaged to! While all this is going on, Lord Goring is appalled that his father is putting pressure on him to finally marry - could Chiltern's sparky younger sister Mabel be about to get her "Ideal Husband"?
As Oscar himself said "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means" but not before he has taken us through twists and turns over the allotted 24 hours of the play's timeline. It is a play I like very much - the two sides of the narrative intersect every so often and there are of course the killer lines dropped like jewels on velvet in the text, oddly enough mostly by the gossiping Lady Markby in the second act when she comes to tea with Mrs Cheeverly - it's like Oscar thought "you want the gags - here they are". So we get scintillating lines like "She ultimately was so broken-hearted that she went into a convent, or on to the operatic stage, I forget which. No; I think it was decorative art-needlework she took up. I know she had lost all sense of pleasure in life" - lines that pop and fizz in the mind and that so betray the debt that Joe Orton had to Wilde.
The film version in 1999 was excellent with the perfect Lord Goring in Rupert Everett, but oddly enough the last time I saw it on stage was again at the Vaudeville Theatre in 2011 in a production that at the time I felt had "no unity of style, time and again a character would come on stage and suddenly you are forced to adapt to a new acting style so you are never sure on which level the play truly sits" Here there certainly was that unity of style thanks to Jonathan Church's well-paced direction but the production felt topsy-turvy with it's casting. I posited the idea that the actors had all called their agents and said "Why haven't I been asked to do the Classic Spring season - get me in one quick" and they have all landed up in AN IDEAL HUSBAND.
The quasar of oddity was Freddie Fox's casting as Lord Goring; in itself it wasn't a bad performance - particularly in the second act - but his youth threw the rest of the characters awry. There was no way Nathaniel Parker's middle-aged Sir Robert would ever have had the late-twenties Lord Goring as his confidante and possible saviour from disgrace, while the idea that Fox's Lord Goring could have been engaged to Mrs Cheeverly years before simply stretched believe to breaking point, particularly as this is a major turning point in the plot's resolution. Similarly, Frances Barber's gurgling, predatory Mrs Cheeverly must have been held back MANY terms at school if she was a contemporary of Sally Bretton's priggish Gertrude Chiltern.
It was a casting coup to get real-life father and son Edward Fox and Freddie Fox to play the fictional father and son of Lord Caversham and Lord Goring and they certainly had an easy playing style together on stage - Edward Fox is now sounding like a member of a lost Hapsburg royal house as his vowels are so clipped, he really was never the same after playing Edward VIII was he? He also seemed odd casting initially as he broke the rhythm of the scenes he popped in and out of, but as with Freddie, came into his own in the second act when Caversham has more substantial scenes - and one absolutely killer exit line, played to perfection.
Other pleasures dotted among the odd cast were Susan Hampshire who was sweetly cutting as Lady Markby (despite the odd stumble), Tim Wallers as Goring's butler Phipps - only on for one scene but stealing everything in the scene apart from the doorknobs - and Faith Omole, in her West End debut, as a spirited and cheeky Mabel Chiltern. The best performance, unsurprisingly, was the unstoppable Frances Barber as Mrs Cheeverly; in this oddly-cast production, she was the perfect fit - even if some of her costumes were not. I am sure they were designed to be over-the-top but at times they got in the way of her performance.
Cut from the same cloth as Mrs Erlynne in LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN - mysterious woman living on her uppers in Europe returns to London to intrigue society - here, Mrs Cheeverly has no real redeeming features - which is why I love her! However I would say that underneath it all, she is a Modern Woman, living on her own and by her own design, using the traits that if she were a man would possibly take her far. In the tying-up-all-the-loose-ends of the last act it is a damn shame that she vanishes from it, I yearned to see her one more time - she is facing an uncertain future with her investments lost but you know she will land on her feet - or her back - but always on her own terms.
Of course it is impossible to watch any of the plays without overlaying it with Oscar's fate: despite the wide-range of characters his authorial voice is so strong you cannot help but see and hear him behind each of them. The play premiered in January 1895 and was still running three months later when Oscar brought Lord Queensberry to court on the ill-fated charge of Criminal Libel; the collapse of that trial led to his arrest for Gross Indecency and all that followed...
While hearing the lines about your past indiscretions catching up with you, it's the following speech by Mrs Cheeverly that rips through the intervening years with a startling prescience:
"Sir Robert, you know what your English newspapers are like. ... Think of their loathsome joy, of the delight they would have in dragging you down, of the mud and mire they would plunge you in. Think of the hypocrite with his greasy smile penning his leading article, and arranging the foulness of the public placard"
Oh Oscar.
