Handbagged by a Wildely amusing chamber recital

To Hell In A Handbag (Assembly Rooms) Blackmail and false identity ★★★✩✩

OSCAR Wilde’s witty comedy The Importance Of Being Earnest was once described by WH Auden as ‘the purest example in English literature of a verbal opera’.

To Hell In A Handbag, which draws its inspiration from the play and centres on two of its minor characters, Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism, is more of an afternoon chamber recital.

But this nimble little twohander, written and performed by Helen Norton and Jonathan White, is nonetheless humorous and enjoyable.

As the foibles and deceptions of the two characters are laid bare, we find the secret lives of Chasuble and Prism have an altogether more farcical and racy side than one could ever have imagined.

Blackmail and false identity are the order of the day, with both Chasuble and Prism engaged in audacious enterprises to make ends meet. And neither of them would be at all happy to have their stratagems made public.

The plot twists this way and that, with some Wildean aphorisms thrown in for good measure, and it would not be fair to give the game away too much.

Suffice to say that the subject matter ranges from the qualifications needed for an Agony Aunt to the seemingly harmless pastime of philately. There is also a mysterious blackmailer by the name of Cuthbert Stanhope, and an island in the South China sea which the villagers have taken to their fundraising bosom – but which proves infuriatingly difficult to find on a map – thrown in for good measure.

There is even the sight of the prim and proper Miss Prism’s attempts to be a novelist, with one of the show’s funniest sections featuring Norton, all facial tics and penny dreadful sincerity as she insists on reading her work aloud.

Fans of Wilde will find much to enjoy in this amusing entertainment in which Victorian pomp and pomposity are given a gentle nudge in the ribs to good effect.

Assembly Rooms until Aug 27