Suchet the leading lady
IT’S hard to avoid tears of l aughter watching David Suchet, wearing a white petticoat over his clothes, delicately balancing a bone china cup and saucer.
In an i nspired piece of gender- swap casting, Suchet i s playing Oscar Wilde’s f amous gorgon Lady Bracknell in a new stage production of The Importance Of Being earnest.
Director Adrian Noble and producer Kim Poster spent months assembling the right actors to play the young lovers Algernon Moncrieff, Gwendolen Fairfax, Jack Worthing and Cecily Cardew.
Those roles were being inhabited by Philip Cumbus, emily Barber, Michael Benz and Imogen Doel, making t hei r major West end debuts. And watching them rehearse at Toynbee hall in east London it became clear they are on the cusp of exciting careers.
Suchet is being earnest about playing the battleship Bracknell.
‘She’s being satirised by Wilde as nouveau riche, which means that she’s even grander than the grand and, as such, what she says ends up being so silly,’ he said.
Suchet has had deportment lessons to help him move about the stage in the heeled boots he has to wear.
And, of course, he has had to be coached in the correct way to carry a handbag.
‘ I will be as much of a woman as I can,’ he told me, ‘ and not i n any way be dressed to l ook l i ke a pantomime dame.’
The company agree that The Importance Of Being earnest is really a comedy of manne r s about . . . rampant sex.
‘ The whole play is hot,’ Suchet said. ‘And that’s why it’s set in the season — the debutante season. It’s a fleshpot! And that’s why everyone wants to get married and, pardon the expression, be laid!’
I had to reach f or my smelling salts.
Along with Michelle Dotrice as Miss Prism and Richard O’Callaghan as the Reverend Canon Chasuble, the cast will embark on a tour that begins at the Theatre Royal Nottingham on May 13 and visits Cambridge, Malvern, Southampton, Newcastle and Bath before previews start at London’s vaudeville, on June 24.