Running Wilde in the West End

A Woman Of No Importance (Vaudeville Theatre) Verdict: Eve’s the Best ★★★★✩

ON LONDON’s strand the Vaudeville has opened a year of Oscar Wilde plays with this talent-jammed production A Woman Of No Importance.

What a treat. A large cast includes Anne Reid, Eleanor Bron, Emma Fielding, William Gaunt — the venerable Gaunty! — and brilliant Eve Best (pictured) in the title role.

Throw in scenery flats, old-fashioned lighting and a proscenium arch with proper red curtain and you have an evening of outwardly traditional theatre-going that Oscar himself might stride into with cane and topper.

This is the play with bounder Lord Illingworth ( dominic Rowan), his ill-used lover Mrs Arbuthnot (Miss Best) and their illegitimate son Ger- ald. It gives us lines such as ‘twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building’; and then there’s that one about the tragedy of all women, and no men, being that they turn into their mothers. so far, so droll. But under the brittle bonmots director dominic dromgoole finds a touching vulnerability. This show subtly tickles up Oscar for the 21st century, giving us an idea not so much of women’s nascent political rights as the emergence of a more democratic approach to love. Over the years there have been so many Importances Of Being Earnest (I now want to scream when they mention muffins) that I had tired of Wilde’s apparently snobbish saws.

At first this play seems similar; Victorian country-house guests crowding the Vaudeville’s small stage to knock aphorisms to and fro like croquet balls.

Phoebe Fildes plays a dreamy proto- sloane. Harry Lister smith’s Gerald, with a One direction hairstyle, is endearingly naive. You have to overlook some irritating colour-blind casting but Crystal Clarke (young American Miss Worsley) is a sweet stage presence.

The show totters towards fourstar territory thanks to Miss Reid’s dotty, slighty dipso Lady Hunstanton. Between acts she also warbles some music-hall songs. And then we have Miss Best, modern-faced, hair down, Mrs Arbuthnot the outsider, whose more open-hearted ways pointed to a world where one adoring kiss no longer need ruin a life, as it did with poor Oscar.