A production doused with fun and ostentation
Max Webster’s production of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is a reiteration of the same version at the National Theatre last year, which starred Ncuti Gatwa and Hugh Skinner. Whilst I don’t relish theatre that hammers away all subtlety in pursuit of overt comedy, it was an excellent production with an all-round wonderful cast. A hard, but not impossible, act to follow.
Starring Olly Alexander as Algy and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Jack, Webster’s version is a commercialised adaptation of the Victorian play; it exposes all the campness and physical theatre possible to ensure comedy. There is much to be commended here.
The aesthetic choices are wonderfully garish. And in the costume and the set design (Rae Smith), this works wonderfully. Wilde has been successfully Bridgerton-ised. The sets are effective in their ostentatiousness, from a lavish living room to a Carroll-esque flowery garden, back to another lavish and phallically inclined living room.
The women – Jessica Whitehurst as Cecily and Kitty Hawthorne as Gwendolyn – stand out. Their stompiness and sexual voracity endear; it’s interesting that their relationship, above any other, carries the most vibrancy. Webster certainly riffs upon the horniness of every character, and it’s an engaging choice. I would argue, however, that just because you can give a prop a handjob doesn’t mean you ought to.
The major problem is that with a Comedy of Manners, especially those of Wilde, almost all of the genius lies in the writing. Provided you understand what it is you are saying, very little is needed for success. The whole text is a verbal sparring match. All the drama and all the battle derives from the language. Thus, it does not matter how much you dress it up if you do not comprehensively understand what you are saying. It did tend to feel that everything was done except understand the dialogue. And this is a problem. Then Stephen Fry regales us with stillness and wit, and you’re engaged again, proving this point. (Shobna Gulati as Miss Prism and Hugh Dennis as Reverend Chasuble are also a delightful addition, but they have little to do).
A thesis could be written on the queerness of this play and how it’s translated in this production. Oscar Wilde is objectively quite famous for being gay. His texts are clearly laden with queer subtext and subtle homoeroticism. The problem is that when you eradicate all subtlety from this aspect, you lose some of the wit and queerness that derives from such subtlety. There’s a nuance to the Wildean queerness that demands a more developed understanding to pull off. Whilst an interesting experiment, it cannot simply be plonked into 21st Century conceptualisations of gayness and its expression without investigation.
All this being said, Webster’s production is doused with fun, the audience are receptive, and there is much to be amused by.