Foxes come out to play
FREDDIE Fox is the best thing in the latest Oscar Wilde revival at the Vaudeville, where they are doing a whole season of Wilde.
Moreover, there are two Foxes for the price of one: while Freddie plays fizzy Viscount Goring, his father Edward gives us Goring’s old buzzard of a pater, the Earl of Caversham. A class act, Edward.
Add Frances Barber, overdoing it as the piece’s vampish Mrs Cheveley, and Susan Hampshire as sweetly dotty Lady Markby, and this is a splashy cast.
The set is gilded and gorgeous. The costumes rustle. Yet part of me wearies of Wilde. One or two Oscar revivals a year may be regarded as palatable; three starts to suffocate.
I say that with regret, for the Vaudeville’s management is admirably high-minded, but there just comes a point at which I can take no more Oscar aphorisms.
An Ideal Husband is the one in which only dull people are brilliant at breakfast, nothing ages like happiness and there is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.
These raise the usual chuckles. But don’t we also need some psychological salt? Don’t we need to see the playwright’s anger against a conceited elite? After all, the London poobahs of 2018 are just as snobbish and excluding as in 1895.
Adventuress Mrs Cheveley returns from abroad to cause marital and political mischief. She possesses a long-forgotten letter which details insidertrading by Sir Robert Chilton at the dawn of his noble career.
Sir Robert (Nathaniel Parker, not quite on top of his lines at Wednesday’s final preview) is now a Foreign Office minister. Mrs Cheveley intends to blackmail this princeling of the Establishment.
Well, fancy that: a rising British politician may not be so pure as he claims. Ha!
To relish that hypocrisy we must surely be left uncertain about the moralities on display. Yet Miss Barber pantomimes Mrs Cheveley’s villainy with flashing eyes and beestung lips.
The role needs subtlety, not this gurning. Though it may be ungallant to say, our Frances is too mature — a collapsing Camembert — to play a character who was supposedly at school with Lady Chilton (a lovely turn from the palpably newer Sally Bretton) and was a lover of Goring. Freddie Fox’s viscount must have still been in short trousers when he was squiring this memsahib.
It is Mr Fox’s night. How beautifully he moves on stage. He plays Wilde with a free, enlivening normality — no heavy pauses or hammery.
This performance marks his coming of age on the West End stage.
AN IDEAL Husband will be screened live in cinemas on June 5. For more information visit oscarwildecinema.com