The Importance of Being Earnest
Playwright: Oscar Wilde Director: Michael Fentiman
In presenting The Importance
of Being Earnest as the climax of its year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde, the Classic Spring theatre company might have thought it was saving the best for last, said Natasha Tripney in The Stage. Michael Fentiman’s “pantomimic production”, alas, does a grave disservice to one of the most immaculately crafted stage comedies of all time. This is Earnest “denuded of nuance” and sexed up to such a daft degree that we see Algernon snogging his manservant Lane – and Gwendolen rubbing herself against the piano and angling her crotch towards Jack “in a way no human woman has ever stood or behaved”. With all the subtlety of a “meat tenderiser”, this “clunker of a production” reduces every character to a caricature, and pitches the comedy at such an inanely frenzied level from the start that there’s “nowhere to go and no space to grow”.
I’m all for “mining” a subtext, but Fentiman’s approach reduces the structure of an exquisitely formed play to “rubble”, agreed Holly Williams in Time Out. If Algernon is pining to be with a man, why is there no sense of ambiguity or “sadness” in his wooing of Cecily? If we are supposed to think that he is simply irresistible to all comers, then it doesn’t come through in Fehinti Balogun’s “prosaic” performance, in which he makes strenuously heavy weather of Wilde’s light-as-air dialogue.
He’s not the only one, said Ben Lawrence in The Daily Telegraph. Many of the cast bellow their lines as if their lives depended on it – not least Sophie Thompson as Lady Bracknell, who manages to be both “over the top and curiously underpowered”. Thank goodness for the truthful, expertly crafted comic performances of Fiona Button as Cecily and Stella Gonet as Miss Prism. The latter “breaks your heart” and helps turn an outrageous evening into a “surprisingly satisfying one”, said Alun Hood on What’s On Stage. This Earnest will infuriate and delight in equal measure, but I for one found it thrillingly “earthy and subversive”, new and vital.