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.

FINALLY! My 2011 theatre-going duck has been broken. I knew there was a reason why I was feeling unduly jittery. It's been so long I had to think twice to make sure I was sitting in the seat properly. And what was the production that saw me back in the theatrical saddle? The rather underwhelming AN IDEAL HUSBAND at the Vaudeville Theatre.

I had wanted to see this for a while and, mindful that it was due to close in February, I booked two in the circle using a £10 off discount. Well, I'm not sure what the stalls were doing but my, we were an intimate collection of punters in the Dress - there were 5 of us in J row - and we were seated in seats 1-5! Needless to say there was much spreading out in the interval. In all other rows there were yawning spaces - between the yawning audience.

The production just feels tired, as if the cast had expended all energy in the months leading up to Christmas in the expectation that it would close early. But no, here we are in it's third month and it seemed to me that all the actors were appearing in different plays. If they had a cohesion under Lindsay Posner's direction initially it seems to have been given the go-by. I sat in my little seat in J row and pined for Oliver Parker's screen version - and I didn't expect to say that anytime soon.Oscar Wilde's play is certainly worth this timely revival with it's plot of a seemingly teflon-coated politician gliding his way slowly but surely up the parliamentary foodchain until confronted with evidence from his past which will ruin him if exposed. Peter Hall's acclaimed and long-running revival in the early 1990s also seemed au courant during the end of John Major's Conservative government. But I guess a politician with a secret is never going to be out of fashion - and in the week when it was announced that the Police were going to re-open the News Of The World phone-hacking case it was particularly thrilling to hear Robert Chiltern say "Spies are of no use nowadays... the newspapers do their work instead"!

What also struck me was how prophetic it was of Wilde's own destiny. The play premiered in January 1895 and only three months later Wilde was in court for the criminal libel charge he brought against the Marquise of Queensberry which led to his own trial for gross indecency and sodomy. Time and again in the play, the subject of a public figure ruined by scandal is raised and while watching it I could see Wilde at his writing desk writing a line, looking up, half-smiling and continuing on to possibly write:

Mrs Cheverley: 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 you silly arse.What was so annoying about the production was the way all the performances - and accents - seemed to clash. From High Comedy to naturalistic, from idiosyncratic to BBC 3 sitcom there was 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.

Charles Kay is so busy with his harrumphing codger as Lord Goring's father that you can hear the rhythm of the accent while the actual words get lost in the bluster, Rachael Sterling as Lady Chiltern is so similar in her honking tone to her mother Diana Rigg that it keeps pulling focus and Fiona Button plays the Thoroughly Modern Miss that is Sir Robert's younger sister in the usual high-pitched voice that seems the default condescending accent now for The Ingenue. Of course one goes to a Wilde play to be pinioned by the darts of epigrammatic wit but here they are mostly confined to one very long second scene and all delivered by one character Lady Markby, played here by Caroline Blakiston. However as hers is such a one-note performance you begin to wonder is it ever going to end and it begins to resemble nothing more than the most hackneyed sitcom: line - line - joke, line - line joke.

Which brings me to Elliot Cowan as Lord Goring. In the role he was born to play Rupert Everett was sublime in the film version but here Cowan as Wilde's cynical playboy throws away one good laugh line after another by speaking in the most bizarre accent. I suspect that somewhere along the line he has heard the recording allegedly of Wilde reading THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL and has adopted the ew-sew mannered way of speaking with leeeengthened vowellls and what haeve yoooo that you want to punch him silent.
What makes this absurd is that he is the only one speaking like this and when he plays scenes with Alexander Hanson as Sir Robert, who speaks his lines in the most conversational way possible, it leaves you no way to just relax into the scene. Hanson is fine, but I joined Owen in wondering why he can't walk across a stage without skiffing the soles of his shoes. I kept expecting his blackmailed politician to break into a buck and wing.

Thank God for Samantha Bond! Although she appears to be channeling her frequent co-star Judi Dench vocally, she alone knows how to play High Comedy on stage while still creating a character with a possible internal life. Her sly and calculating Mrs. Cheverley was a pure delight and I pined for her when she was not onstage - Oscar you clown, why on earth did you not have her make an appearance in the final long-winded scene?

The supporting company all played the long party scene at the top of the play with an anonymity which almost had them semaphoring "don't worry, the stars will be on soon". One bright spot was Max Digby as Goring's manservant Phipps who got a bigger laugh with one line than Cowan managed with a whole speech.

Stephen Brimson Lewis can usually be relied upon for a glittery design but here we got a standing set of burnished gold which suggested that he too had seen MADAME DE SADE at the Wyndhams two years ago. Apart from his costumes for Mrs. Cheverley, the costumes for the women all looked like they were bolts of fabric ready to go back to Borovics in the morning.Oh well. Onwards and upwards into the theatreland of 2011....