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.