Review: The Importance Of Being Earnest - The Jewish Chronicle

No matter who the author, familiarity can breed contempt. Wilde’s tart comedy has suffered from over-exposure almost as much that other classic, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But if there is one thing that has marked out Timothy Sheader’s two-year-old regime as artistic director of the Open Air it is the determination to renew familiar works.

It certainly is the case with this elegant and expressionistic The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Irina Brown. Before the action starts, Brown has her cast peer at the audience voyeuristically, lest we think that the cutting observations in Wilde’s 1895 play apply only to the upper classes of a 100 years ago, and not to us.
The main features of Kevin Knight’s design are a sweeping, curved white ramp and a mirrored back wall, with the former allowing for grand exits and entrances, and the latter reflecting the vanity of Wilde’s posing protagonists.

And whenever these poseurs say something disparaging and arrogant about the working classes, the servants are allowed moments of quiet disdain. If this was Chekhov, the disparity in privilege would hint at a powder keg of revolution. But Brown sensibly takes this as far as she can and then gets on with the filigree-intricate plot, involving two eligible bachelors and their pursuit of two desirable young women. Their convoluted courtships generate a spiral of arch repartee that would be tiresome if it was not so funny.

Unfortunately, the cast have to compete with an absence of acoustics. And despite the use of microphones they end up shouting Wilde’s epigrams with all the finesse of a football manager adjusting his team’s offside trap.

But the Open Air Theatre can always be relied upon to deliver its own brand of outdoor magic to a play. On this occasion — a matinee performance — butterflies fluttered around the stage. One landed on the sleeve of Ryan Kiggell’s suave John Worthing while in the trees above the stage, a determined blackbird repeatedly plucked at plump crab apples.

All this was going on while Susan Wooldridge’s Lady Bracknell did her best to reinvent the “a handbag?” line. The challenge is to deliver the famous exclamation in a way that uses the expectation associated with it ever since Edith Evans’s famous version. Wooldridge raises anticipation of something slightly unexpected with a hesitation, then a pause, and then finally and simply, speaks the line. That the moment is an anti-climax would not matter so much if elsewhere Wooldridge’s Bracknell had the kind of authority that makes everyone else on stage quake. But she is too quickly established as a figure to be ridiculed rather than feared.

Dominic Tighe’s Algernon is satisfyingly arrogant and dashing — a perfect foil to Kiggell’s better mannered Worthing. And there is another fine partnership struck between Lucy Briggs Owen’s romantic teen Cecily and Jo Herbert’s sophisticated Gwendolen. One day, in a very long time, Herbert will make a terrific Lady Bracknell. She has a way of delivering a line with a sincere, helium-light laugh that, when needed, morphs into the most withering of grimaces. It might make a terrific accessory with the handbag line. But, for now, as Gwendolen she is a pitch perfect.

The subversive note established in the very first moments of the production is never far away. It is sustained by a quartet of musicians who merrily busk between the scenes. There are times when the clarinet-led strains could almost be klezmer, as if we were viewing the frolics of the English through the eyes of a mocking foreign observer, which, with the Irish-born Wilde, we are. But leave it to the Open Air’s magic to be the ultimate leveller of English class conventions, and to the blackbird who upstaged everyone when he dropped a crab apple and frantically ran after it as it rolled onto the stage. Summer is here.