Peter Viney's Blog

The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde

Directed by Michael Fentiman
Designed by Madeleine Girling

Classic Spring Theatre
The Vaudeville Theatre, London

Friday 31st August 2018, 19.30

CAST
Jacob Fortune-Lloyd – Jack Worthing
Fehinti Balogun – Algernon Moncrief
Pippa Nixon – Gwendolyn Fairfax
Meg Coombs – Cecily Cardew (understudy replacing Fiona Button)
Sophie Thompson – Lady Bracknell
Jeremy Swift – Reverend Chasuble
Stella Gonet- Miss Prism
Geoffrey Freshwater – Lane
Matt Crosby – Merriman
Tim Gibson – Moulton, Ensemble
Alana Ramsey – ensemble.

Classic Spring brings its season of Oscar Wilde to a close with his greatest play of all. The Importance is always a problem for me in that I know every line before it’s spoken (see other reviews of other productions of the play). The reviews of this one are Love it versus Hate it, too. I’m open to a radical take on the play because otherwise it’s running through the same things again and again. If we think of recent major productions, they added a novelty. There was the “Bunbury Players” version as if done by an Am Dram company, with Nigel Havers and Martin Jarvis. Then the last production at this same theatre had David Suchet playing Lady Bracknell in drag. So we expect something extraneous.

Algernon (Fehinti Balogun) and Lane (Geoffrey Freshwater)

They certainly added extraneous bits. Algernon kisses a male friend goodbye at the start. Then Lane, the butler, becomes a pet to be kissed, given sandwiches and a cigarette. He sits through a scene with Algernon when he’s normally off stage. If you’re giving Lane a cigarette do something with it. Have him blow a smoke ring. Not here. At the start of Act Two, Cecily has been doing something naughty with a gardener and sharing a cigarette afterwards. Algernon has a picture of writhing naked men on the wall. The reviews say there’s lesbian canoodling between the female servants in the background, though not tonight as one had had to step up to understudy Cecily.

I agree that we all know the Wilde biography at that time, and it doesn’t need punching across. The lines have served as they are for years. Then Gwendolyn finds Jack’s face plunged into her lap. Gardeners and servants hover – not just Merriman criss-crossing with Algernon’s luggage either. Servants in the background are a “why not?” – you need understudies and may as well keep them busy and watching the action. But here they looked like snoopers.

Worse, rather than simply getting on with finding the army list with the General’s name at the end, books are distributed to all, and then new lines are added. To add business to a Wilde play is bravery, to add new lines to a Wilde play is suicidal. Then there was an unnecessary gap and semi black out before the final Bracknell-Jack one-two closing lines. They did a closing dance off, but if you go to the trouble of choreographing a dance, then go for it. A few seconds is not enough.

They got through it fast – out in two hours including the interval. We used to run it at 1 hour 45 to 1 hour 50 in our productions for ELT students, and we had cuts. To get it done that fast I thought lines were gabbled and shouted. They seemed to hurry through, without that effortless cruise control that the lines should have. It was almost as if they raced through the classic lines as if embarrassed by them. The lines should self-propel smoothly in a way that makes Wilde easy to learn – the next line feels inevitable.

However, I don’t think it was as coarse and farcical as some reviewers thought, though it was played larger than normal. This play can take being read aloud by amateurs and get laughs. It can take whatever you throw at it. Playing strongly for laughs does not bother me.

Pippa Nixon as Gwendolyn, Sophie Thompson as Lady Bracknell

Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Jack had a great range of agonised facial expressions (which I liked) and was energetically schlerotic. Pippa Nixon as Gwendolyn was unusually erotic.  I think Jack should look as if he were plucking lines from the air in desperate inspiration. I didn’t get that feel.  I felt all those daft Algernon kissing subtext bits undermined his role. The cucumber sandwiches sequence felt clumsy. I didn’t think the Jack-Algernon relationship worked. If you’re presenting Algernon as overtly bisexual, you can see why Jack wouldn’t want him marrying Cecily.

Jeremy Swift as Canon Chasuble was outstandingly good.

Sophie Thompson as Lady Bracknell

I’ve long favored playing Lady Bracknell younger. We know Jack is 29, and disappeared 28 years ago. We assume Gwendolyn is younger than Jack but older than Cecily. Cecily is eighteen, and still has a governess. We know Lady Bracknell had “nothing” when she got married. I’d play her around fifty, not the aged hooting dowager that has become the accepted version. I liked Sophie Thomson’s energy and movement as Lady Bracknell, striding around for her lines. Fabulous facial expressions add to her interpretation. I’d like her to drop out of RP just a touch when she says she had nothing when she married, but that’s me. I say it every time I see it.

By the standards of the season of Classic Spring, the set was fine, but nothing special. The row of flowers in Act Two was good and the impressionist painting backcloth was excellent, but the dull windowed backdrop in Act 3 was dull.

Fehiniti Balogun (Algernon) and Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (Jack)

Quite rightly, the cast singled out Meg Coombs in the curtain call, understudying Cecily without us seeing any joins in her performance. She was very good indeed, and she has that long scene with Pippa Nixon as Gwendolyn, and as I have said before, Pippa Nixon is British Theatre A-list, so a daunting prospect for an interchange with an understudy. On the other hand actors have told me that the A-list are the easiest to act with because they help you feel good … Kenneth Branagh was the example they agreed on. Pippa Nixon and Meg Coombs made it look as if they’d been playing the roles together for weeks.

Tea scene (tonight Meg Coombs replaced Fiona Button, who is seen here)

BUT I’ve seen this scene better directed. In fact, I’ve ALWAYS seen it better directed. Take Cecily placing sugar in Gwendolyn’s cup. Here it’s one lump, then the whole bowl. Usually this is drawn out, over four or five insertions of sugar. Then here Gwendolyn spits out the tea, where it’s much funnier if her manners force her to drink it with grimaces. A lump of cake is broken off by hand and shoved at her. It’s all rushed.

Overall? It’s a hard one.I admired the energy, and the added bits that pissed off other reviewers were pretty fleeting in the whole and mildly irritated me but didn’t make me fume as they did. But I’ve heard far more audience laughter in other more conventional productions, even though this production was leaning over backwards to milk the laughs. I’ve often been surprised at the audience laughs (of surprise) at those superb but very well-known lines in this play. It’s between two and three stars for me. I think saying it’s “vulgar”or “carry on film” is too harsh.  It did lack flow. It was a misguided version of Algernon, but I blame the extraneous stuff. A “Carry On” version wouldn’t worry me. It certainly wasn’t that. I’m not doing half stars and I admire energy and innovation, but there was “nothing delightful” in it.  Wilde should delight. So I think two rather than three.

**

PROGRAMME

The programme has an article by Meg Coombs and Tim Gibson on being understudies. Especially interesting in the light of tonight’s role. There’s also a piece by Giles Brandreth on Oscar Wilde smoking hashish with Andre Gide in Algiers!

BROADCAST:

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
5 star
What’s On Stage, *****
4 star
Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times ****
Neil Norman, The Express ****
Henry Hitchins, Evening Standard ****
3 star
Paul Taylor, The Independent ***

Does anybody need The Importance to be “decoded” in this heavy-handed, pseudo-radical way? The cast perform the play with a rampant energy that builds up its own giddy appeal. But there’s barely a shred of subtlety in all the cartoonish excess. Paul Taylor

2 star
Michael Billington, The Guardian **

This is one of those occasions when, in the words of Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolen, it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind: it becomes a pleasure. While many members of the first-night audience were in hysterics, I found Michael Fentiman’s production of this comic masterpiece inexpressibly coarse and vulgar. Michael Billington

Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph **

Michael Fentiman’s new production (the last in Dominic Dromgoole’s West End Wilde season) is as subtle as concrete. If the Carry On team had ever decided to adapt the play, the results would have been similar. Ben Lawrence

Natasha Tripney, The Stage **

Some of the productions have achieved that with flashes of humanity and pathos amid the quips, but this last one, of his best-known play, has all the subtlety of a meat tenderiser. It’ll sell well, no doubt, but it’s a clunker of a production. Natasha Tripney

Maryam Phillpot, The Reviews Hub ** 1/2

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

OSCAR WILDE PLAYS
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2014
An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring, 2018
A Woman of No Importance, by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring, 2017
Importance of Being Earnest 2010 by Oscar Wilde, Rain or Shine Company
Importance of Being Earnest 2014 by Oscar Wilde, West End & Tour, directed by Lucy Bailey
Importance of Being Earnest, 2015 by Oscar Wilde with David Suchet as Lady Bracknell
Importance of Being Earnest 2018 by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring Theatre
Importance of Being Earnest, 2019 by Oscar Wilde, Watermill Theatre
Lady Windermere’s Fan, by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring, 2018
Salomé, by Oscar Wilde, RSC, Stratford, 2017

PIPPA NIXON
The Tempest, Wanamaker Playhouse 2016 (Ariel)
Therese Raquin, Bath, 2014
As You Like It RSC 2013 (Rosalind)
Hamlet RSC 2013 (Ophelia)
Richard III, RSC 2012 (Lady Anne)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – RSC 2011  (Titania)
The City Madam, RSC 2012
Cardenio RSC  2012

STELLA GONET
For Services Rendered, by Somerset Maugham, Chichester

JACOB FORTUNE-LLOYD
Macbeth, Globe 2016 (MacDuff)
Othello – RSC 2015 (Cassio)
The Merchant of Venice – RSC 2015(Bassanio)

JEREMY SWIFT
The Way of The World, Chichester 2012