Crumbs! There’s too much sauce, Earnest
PRODUCERS love Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest because it sells plenty of tickets. Directors are warier of the play, simply because it is so well known.
How to make it different? How to escape the tyranny of those celebrated aphorisms and the dreaded ‘handbag’ line? In short, how to achieve intention numero uno, which is to assert the director’s view?
The West End’s latest ‘Earnest’, fourth and final part of an honourable year of Wilde under the Vaudeville’s proscenium arch, is done at a canter in luscious costumes.
There is more innuendo than you normally find in Victorian revivals. Wilde’s wit emerges intact, but director Michael Fentiman nearly wrecks it.
The opening tableau shows us London bachelor Algernon Moncrieffe playing a piano with apparent rapture while being kissed by a beau in a bowler hat. There is quite a bit more male kissing, and on the wall is a copy of Thomas Eakins’s oil painting, Wrestlers.
Algie (Fehinti Balogun, who needs to work on vocal variety) kisses not only his butler Lane (Geoffrey Freshwater, looking slightly embarrassed), but also his friend Jack Worthing (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). Algie and Jack also do some nose-rubbing. Given later plot developments, I suppose this takes us towards incest territory. Crumbs.
Happily, Wilde’s brilliantly taut script intervenes and the story gathers momentum. Lady Bracknell arrives, played quite young by a possibly over-energetic Sophie Thompson. Pippa Nixon’s Gwendolen, likewise, is an unsubtle interpretation.
Late 19th-century sexual repression is abandoned. We have flared nostrils and much rubbing of the lower quarters.
When Gwendolen talks of her ‘vibrations’, it is usual to allow the audience to enjoy the joke at her puzzled expense. Here she says the word with such lubriciousness, it almost deserves a parp of saxophone.
Director Fentiman’s approach at least prevents the entertainment becoming stuffy, but he pushes the coarseness about 20 per cent too far, not least when the characters repeatedly stuff sandwiches into one another’s mouths. Truly horrid. Artistic director Dominic Dromgoole should put a stop to that particular detail at once.
MUCH of the rest of the show is congenial. Fiona Button is fresh as Cecily, a more artful minx, and Stella Gonet’s Miss Prism likewise prospers without any clumsy gurning.
Algie’s ‘I hate to seem inquisitive...’ when he is desperate to know his late father’s name is choicely done, but late on we have to endure another director’s signal with a kiss between two housemaids and a butch young gardener.
‘Earnest’ is a pretty bulletproof play and its virtues shine. I enjoyed the show. But if you want a thoughtful take on poor, brave, put-upon Oscar, you would do better to catch Rupert Everett’s fine new film, The Happy Prince. Wednesday matinee, just as it has been most seasons since 1903. Its two-hour summer show mixes traditional circus thrills with some delightfully splashy aquatics. The building’s Edwardian engineering having been restored a few years ago, a few turns of understage cogs transform the stage ring into a blue pool big enough for a troupe of balletic bathing belles in flapper-style swimming costumes.
The Hippodrome is run by the Jay family, long part of Yarmouth. Sometime Sixties rocker Peter Jay (Peter Jay And The Jaywalkers — they once shared a bill with the Stones) is slowly handing over to his sons. Ben Jay does technical stuff and Jack Jay is ringmaster, engaging in banter with funny-man Johnny Mac.
One of the Hippodrome’s cast, Australian balancing-man Sascha Williams, made it to this year’s semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent and he is here for the summer, wobbling on top of a crazy series of cylinders. Blindfolded. While playing a guitar. And that’s before they set fire to it all.
Add pyjama’d Canadian hunk Eric McGill on a swinging trapeze and Mexican juggler Roberto Carlos, who pops orange ping-pong balls out of his mouth, and you have a decent enough circus. But then comes Brazilian act Dupla Mao Na Roda, a muscular duo, one of whom has severely limited strength in his legs.
He slides himself out of his wheelchair and is soon raising himself aloft on his companion’s outstretched hand — and later on top of the bloke’s head. More than a feat of strength, this grabs your emotions.
The Flying Aces quintet do good stuff from the rafters and an engaging comedy routine on a trampoline.
MEANWHILE, any feminist qualms about the shortskirted chorus beauties are allayed with a synchronised display on the double bars by three beefy lads from Kiev, the bare-chested Team Romanovskyi.
A party of 40-something women in the front rows were soon fanning themselves — and not because of the heat.
Best fun I’ve had for weeks.