The central performance in Lindsay Posner's fizzing production is so terrific, I left the theatre not just won over by the exquisite plotting of Oscar Wilde's 1895 satire, but thinking about how different actors can bowl you over for completely different reasons.
I'm going to risk a generalisation. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of performer. There are those who not only inhabit the role but bring to it something of their own. With Kevin Spacey, for instance, it is a quality that suggests his character mysteriously knows something that everyone else onstage has yet to learn.
Then there are actors like Elliot Cowan (pictured, with Fiona Button) who are so completely absorbed in the character, nothing of any previous performance is visible. In Cowan's case, I had to check the programme repeatedly to see if it was the same actor whose brutal Stanley Kowalski raped Rachel Weisz's Blanche Dubois in the Donmar's revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Kowalski is light years away from Wilde's hedonistic fop, Viscount Goring, but Cowan makes the leap utterly convincingly.
The focus of the production begins with the title role, Alexander Hanson's Sir Robert Chiltern - a politician so upstanding that his wife (Rachael Stirling) is more in love with the reputation than the man. We open at a party hosted by the couple, the kind of soiree where Wilde's epigrams shine as brightly as the gilt interiors designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis.
The plot picks up when Sir Robert is blackmailed by Samantha Bond's seductive Mrs Cheveley into publicly backing a South American canal project in which she has heavily invested. The fun starts with the arrival of Cowan's hilariously supercilious Viscount, best friend to the Chilterns, ex-fiancé of Mrs Cheveley and, it turns out, spokesman for Wilde's compassionate heart.
What is so surprising is how fresh Wilde feels. His observations on the hypocrisy of public life and the ruthlessness of the press could easily have been made today.
Posner guides us through a play that flirts with melodrama, dabbles with farce and in which the emotionally remote upper classes are brought down to earth.
None more so than the Cowan's superior Viscount who, by the end, turns from high-society wit into a frantic fixer bearing the rueful look of man who has experienced more life than he bargained for. It is, for me, the performance of the year.
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