The IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST at the Vaudeville Theatre: Classic Spring has sprung...

The year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde at the Vaudeville Theatre has been an enjoyable season courtesy of Dominic Dromgoole's Classic Theatre Company, a debut season in their mission to present classic writer's plays on the proscenium arch stages that they were written for.

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.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND at the Vaudeville - Wilde casting

Dominic Dromgoole's theatre company Classic Spring is coming into the home stretch now in it's year-long season of plays by Oscar Wilde; unsurprisingly THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST will close the season but before that we have the first of the two plays Wilde presented in the fateful year of 1895, AN IDEAL HUSBAND.

It has been thrilling to see the plays presented together and to fully appreciate the fizzing wit and barnstorming melodrama in A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE and LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN.  However AN IDEAL HUSBAND, although it has these elements, seems to have Wilde trying a more through-drama with less chattering characters swamping the storyline.

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.

 

LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN at the Vaudeville - Looking at the stars...

Dominic Dromgoole's Classic Spring Theatre Company has been set up to stage the works of great British dramatists from the 19th and 20th Centuries in the theatres where they were first presented.  Their first season is celebrating the work of Oscar Wilde at the Vaudeville Theatre, a theatre Wilde knew well, and after an excellent launch with Dromgoole's own production of A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, we now have LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN, fluttering away in a production directed by Kathy Burke.

Wilde's comedy of manners was first staged in 1892 and has been revived frequently since as well as being the basis for five film versions although it's fair to say that none of these have lived long in the collective memory.  I had only read the play so was keen to experience it properly, although I wondered at the choice of Burke as director.  Luckily I need not have worried as her production has a humanity and warmth to it that one might not expect from Wilde's comedy of shaken morals among the English upper class.

Lord and Lady Windermere have been married for two years and he has given her an expensive fan as a gift for her 21st birthday.  However two titled friends, Lord Darlington and the Duchess of Berwick, spoil her day by telling her that it is the talk of society that her husband has been making secretive visits to Mrs Erlynne, an older woman of scandalous reputation.  The priggishly moral Lady Windermere confronts her husband who admits he has been paying Mrs Erlynne money but says he has not been unfaithful; when he asks her to invite Mrs Erlynne to her birthday ball she refuses, but Windermere invites her anyway.

Mrs Erlynne arrives at the party and causes a sensation but Lady Windermere ignores her.  Alone with Lord Darlington he takes advantage of her upset and invites her to leave her husband for him as Darlington has always secretly loved her.  The confused Lady Windermere refuses and Darlington leaves saying he will leave the country the next day.  However when she sees how her husband stays with Mrs Erlynne and that their family friend 'Tuppy' Lorton is equally smitten with her, Lady Windermere changes her mind and after leaving a note, follows Darlington to his home.

Mrs. Erlynne finds the note but destroys it before the husband can see it; of course that's when we discover that Mrs. Erlynne is actually Lady Windermere's long-presumed-dead mother.  She too fled her husband and baby for another man but when he left her she found herself alone.  Under an assumed name she has returned to London and blackmailed Lord Windermere into bankrolling her to a new start in society.  However now her daughter looks about to repeat her own actions, Mrs. Erlynne will stop at nothing to save her from a life of shame...

I am sure the play could be acted in "the traditional style" - lots of declamatory readings, the cast in frozen tableaux and heavy brocade and Victorian excess everywhere - but Kathy Burke keeps the action souffle-like and it is a production full of air and light.  This is helped immeasurably by designer Paul Wills' stripped-back, simple set and costume designs as well as the chosen colour palette of soft hues of pink, purple and blues - it really makes for a delightful production to watch.

Kathy Burke is also helped with a cast who play with a twinkle in their eye which makes the sudden melodramatic moments seem all the more serious; they also all play with a disregard that they are saying some of Wilde's most memorable lines, there is no signalling to the audience as if to say "You are all going to know what I am about to say..."

After having graduated from drama school only last year, it would be unlikely that Grace Molony's Lady Windermere had any particular depth but she played it with a pleasing sincerity as did Joshua James in the tricky role of Lord Windermere who came into his own in the final scene of compromise and keeping secrets.  I also liked Joseph Marcell as "Tuppy" the Windermere's friend who finds himself besotted with the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne but fearful of her reputation; he played it with just the right air of happy befuddlement.

Kevin Bishop is an interesting choice as Lord Darlington who is another of Wilde's charming but dangerous titled womanizers but he fought the temptation to barnstorm lines like "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" and made him a very subtle cad.

The real surprise - for me at lest - was the delightful performance of Jennifer Saunders as the self-entitled and snobbish Duchess of Berwick, a woman at the centre of her own universe and eager to know all the gossip.  I had fears that she might play it too over the top but she fitted into the tone of the production and seemed very at home within it.  Her character's relatively short appearances onstage is helpfully padded out with the Duchess leading the audience in a front-cloth sing-song.  It actually was interesting to watch her in performance, seeing her ease onstage and delivering her witty rejoinders and put-downs with the sure knowledge of how to land a laugh; Dominic Dromgoole... I think you have found your Lady Bracknell for the upcoming production of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. 

Samantha Spiro was an inspired choice as Mrs. Erlynne, sensuous and languidly in command of the men's slavish attentions but able to become passionately sympathetic in defending the daughter she has returned to but realizes will have to leave again without her identity being revealed.  The final scene where she makes her only demand - a photo of her now-grown daughter and grand-child - was played with a lightness of touch which hinted at the emotion beneath.  She really has a uniquely quicksilver personality on stage.

It is impossible to watch any of Wilde's classic plays without looking for clues relating to the downfall that awaited him only three years after the play's premiere, and indeed it is interesting that Wilde wrote of a wife finding out about her husband's clandestine visits to a disreputable woman in the same year that Lord Alfred Douglas started to introduce him to male prostitute 'renters'.  Interesting too that the play's seemingly happy end for the married couple is based on the keeping of secrets from each other.

I highly recommend LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN which runs until April 7th but it will also be screened in cinemas on the 20th March.  Classic Spring's next production is AN IDEAL HUSBAND... and yes Constant Reader, tickets are already booked!