This is only the second full-scale production of its year-long Oscar Wilde stint (along with a couple of holiday-season diversions), but already Dominic Dromgoole’s Classic Spring company seems to have developed a house style. Like Dromgoole with A Woman Of No Importance last autumn, Kathy Burke directs Wilde’s first great dramatic success in a careful pastiche of the late-Victorian manner but which also includes an assortment of tweaks and nudges more in tune with a 2018 audience. The extent to which the blend succeeds is a matter of individual taste; I found myself more or less on-side at the beginning, but my sympathies paled progressively as the evening continued.

Burke has a keen directorial eye, but periodically her comic actor’s instincts win out. She brings out the blood tie between the idealistic, moralistic Lady Windermere (Grace Molony) and the disgraced Mrs Erlynne (who London society believes is Lord Windermere’s mistress, and played by Samantha Spiro, who can command a stage without a shred of imperiousness) by giving them both a little snort when they laugh... then overdoes it in the final minutes by having them do so in unison. As the Duchess of Berwick (a Wildean warm-up for Lady Bracknell), Jennifer Saunders begins her first proper stage appearance in 20 years with brittle precision, but is allowed to broaden her performance in Act Two. After the interval, the Duchess disappears from the action, but returns front-of-curtain to cover a scene change by singing – well, delivering – a musical number with the refrain “Keep your hands off my fan”, a clear euphemistic abbreviation here for “fanny”.

Alas, Burke and co. ratchet up the comedy just as Wilde is heightening the drama and sentiment, as the Windermeres and Mrs Erlynne each find that both happiness and morality are more complex matters than they had believed. For me, this is where the production falls on the side of contradiction rather than counterbalance. For others, though, Burke arguably meets her target: “I want to come away feeling I’ve been told a really good story, which I’ve enjoyed, that I’ve had a bit of a giggle and that it’s opened my mind a little.”

Written for the Financial Times.