A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2
Opened 16 October, 2017
***

Dominic Dromgoole’s new company Classic Spring kicks off a year of Oscar Wilde at the Vaudeville with this revival of his 1893 skeleton-in-closet drama. An immense amount of thought, care and skill has gone into every aspect of the production, and the result is a thing of beauty but not of profundity.

The fundamental factor is that no amount of dramaturgical keyhole-surgery on the text – reinstating more outspoken or socially critical lines which Wilde cut from his finely polished final version – can restore the potency and edge of what is at stake for various characters, or how keen a challenge the play may be to audience sensibilities. A century and a quarter on, we may intellectually understand the past stigma of the woman casually used and abandoned, but even in the midst of the Harvey Weinstein allegations there is little contemporary bite to the back-story of Lord Illingworth and “Mrs Arbuthnot”. Her determination to refuse his advancement of her son (who does not know his fatherhood) is less a thrilling example of a woman resisting her subordinate status than a cue to mutter an enthusiastic “Damn right!” in the stalls. The sententiousness of young American visitor Hester Worsley, representing a new land founded on noble ideals, now clangs with bleak irony. What remains is a moderate dose of sentiment – as a Wilde character elsewhere remarked, “The good [end] happily, and the bad unhappily; that is what fiction means” – and Oscar’s legendary wit.

I repeat, what Dromgoole’s production does do, it does superlatively. Eleanor Bron is a natural at delivering Wildean banter, and before Illingworth is revealed as a cad, his playful, cynical exchanges with his old friend Mrs Allonby make for some admirable rallies between Dominic Rowan and Emma Fielding. Eve Best’s Mrs Arbuthnot is as compelling as she can be given the passage of time. Dromgoole realises with flair his stated intention of relishing a proscenium-arch configuration as integral to the way the play works; Jonathan Fensom’s designs are full and detailed, requiring a few minutes’ scene-changing, which is covered by front-curtain entr’actes in which Anne Reid (who plays Lady Hunstanton) and a clutch of supporting actors deliver sentimental music-hall numbers. Profundity is hardly necessary amid such exceptional craftsmanship.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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