Powerful payoff that’s a long time coming
A Woman of No Importance Vaudeville
To revive one Wilde social comedy may be a safe choice. To revive four looks like a grand temerity. Dominic Dromgoole, the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, is launching an ambitious year-long celebration of Ireland’s greatest gift to English wit and can’t be accused of ducking a challenge.
That said, part of the risk attached to A Woman of No Importance is the lurking danger of cosiness. It reaped negative reviews at its outing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2003. Irrespective of the deficiencies of Adrian Noble’s “handsome-looking” production, critics highlighted shortcomings in the work itself, with – to cite one review – two acts of “applause-begging remarks” followed by two of “sentimental pieties”.
That’s a simplification, but the play does often resemble a forced marriage of surface-skimming satire and deep emotional havoc. And what should be a honeymoon period of aphoristic badinage in the first scene finds Wilde, who wrote this while nursing Bosie in Norfolk, performing a protracted limbering-up exercise.
Dromgoole and designer Jonathan Fensom don’t make things easy for their cast of 16 by placing them in a cluttered, confining, chocolate-box set that requires them to manoeuvre very precisely to avoid bumping into the other confectionery. Some frontof-cloth interludes to cover for the scene changes – with Anne Reid as Lady Hunstanton, warbling vaguely apposite parlour songs with liveried accompaniment – lend a strained gentility to proceedings. What’s required is a stronger hint of arch, confident, loud modernity.
When we’re allowed to connect with the dramatic crux of the matter, the production moves from gaslight flickers of illumination to dependable theatrical electricity. Twenty years earlier, Lord Illingworth (an underdandified but duly imposing Dominic Rowan) had a child, Gerald, out of wedlock with Mrs Arbuthnot (Eve Best, emotionally walled-up but seeping with grief). In refusing to marry her, the rogue ruined her life, but he could now make amends by employing their son as his secretary.
Such a gesture represents a smoothing over of social injustice and personal pain that Mrs A refuses to countenance. The tug-of-war over the lad together with the final showdown between the estranged couple make for exhilarating viewing, powerfully hitting home about relations, hypocrisies and double standards between the sexes, then and now.
Amid a cavalcade of Wildean epigrams, one stands out: “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” It occurs in Act II, then in Act IV. The second time, we’re at a place where it’s far more than just a bon mot, it stings; but boy does it take time getting there.