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.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET at Stratford East: "You've come home... Always had a fondness for you I did"

In 1973, while in London for the UK premiere of GYPSY, Stephen Sondheim went to the Theatre Royal Stratford East to see Christopher Bond's version of the melodrama SWEENEY TODD.  Sondheim enjoyed the Grand Guignol atmosphere and how street songs were incorporated into the action but what really excited him was how Bond changed the plot from a penny-dreadful melodrama into a revenge thriller with Sweeney seeking vengeance on Judge Turpin for the death of his wife.  An idea was born...

Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF LONDON opened in 1979 in New York and the following year in London and although both productions lost money, it has gone on to be rightly viewed as one of the great Broadway musicals and Sondheim's masterpiece.  London has taken the show to it's heart as was Sondheim's original wish - the original production won the Olivier Award for Best Musical and it has since won two further Oliviers for Best Musical Revival.

And now - finally - I have seen it in the theatre where Sondheim first got his inspiration for the show thanks to the Royal Academy of Music's Musical Theatre department who gave a few performances of SWEENEY TODD last week to showcase their final year students.  There were a few odd directorial choices and wonky performances but it made me realize that I could happily watch a good production of SWEENEY TODD every day!  This was my tenth SWEENEY and there has only been one really bad one - a ghastly am-dram one at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 1992 - which is a very good batting average I reckon.

The show also is a good example of why Sondheim always gives praise to his book writers.  Hugh Wheeler's book for SWEENEY TODD is a classic of musical storytelling, there are nine main characters who are all vividly drawn and it not only stands up to repeated viewings but the book always throws up things I had never noticed before.

I always thought the show would be a perfect fit for Stratford East and indeed it was, and Michael Fentiman's production did the trick for me; I found it hugely enjoyable although it did seem to combine elements of John Doyle's 2004 stripped-down production, Jonathan Kent's 2011 Chichester production and Lonny Price's recent concert version.

Opting for the now almost-standard 20th Century setting, this SWEENEY TODD started with grim-faced morticians taking a break from a new cadaver to sing THE TALE OF SWEENEY TODD and of course the cadaver turned out to be Sweeney who rose from the slab to join them at the end of the song.

And we were off on the wonderful runaway train that is SWEENEY TODD... an unstoppable thrill ride to it's shattering conclusion: as I have often said, the final sequence of the show - if done right - should be one of the most relentlessly scary things you can experience, even if you know the show  It has an internal motor that if stoked properly gathers pace leaving dead bodies in it's wake and an icy, clammy grip on the back of your neck.  Happily the RAM students gave it their all and if it *just* fell short it was due to the odd staging that slightly distanced you from the full action.

You see, Sweeney's mechanical chair was... well, not mechanical.  Like the recent concert version, once his victim's throat was cut they promptly stood up, walked down from the raised barbershop and jumped down an opened stage trap-door now the door to Mrs Lovett's ovens.  Actually the trap-door was a good idea for the ovens as designers usually struggle with incorporating that into their stage design but the stage traffic is always so busy at the climax of the show that this production's staging at the end just got too convoluted.

The fact that the performers were young was only a hindrance in Lawrence Smith's Sweeney who simply didn't have the heft for the role - he looked more like a pasty street thug than a serial killer.  His falling-short was exacerbated by most of his scenes being shared with Elissa Churchill's  no-prisoners-taken performance as Nellie Lovett.

Although she looked more like a candidate for LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS' Audrey, Churchill gave a delightful performance of venal intent - Sweeney was her target from the second he returned to her shop - and although I felt her performance at times seemed too much like a facsimile of Emma Thompson's in the concert version, she still had enough personality to light up the gloomy stage.  I hope a successful career beckons...

In a seemingly cross-borders cast I also enjoyed Ruben Van keer's sweet-natured Anthony and Johan Berg's imposing Judge Turpin and there was an intriguing double act in Francisco del Solar's Hispanic Pirelli and Tao Deng's slippery Beadle.

Charlotte Clitherow's Beggar Woman was almost there while Brian Raftery's Tobias and Genevieve McCarthy's Johanna could both have done with more work - maybe simmering down the former and bringing the latter more up to the boil?

But like I said, this was an enjoyable production of one of my favourite musicals and it will be good to keep out an eye to see if the students get the breaks they need.

Now Stratford East.... how's about a proper production?