Lady Windermere’s Fan

It’s a family affair at the Haymarket. Following Peter Hall’s revival of The Royal Family, starring Judi Dench and assorted stage aristocracy, comes the director’s revival of this Oscar Wilde classic, boasting yet more familial connections.

In Lady Windermere’s Fan, we get two celebrity pairings for the price of one. Real-life mother and daughter Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson play on-stage mother and daughter (though the latter remains, remarkably, unaware of the ties that bind) while real-life husband and wife Googie Withers and John McCallum play on-stage and fustified brother and sister.

In this Wildean comedy-drama-social satire, Richardson is the lady of the title, a Good Woman who misinterprets her husband’s attentions and financial favours towards mysterious Bad Woman, Mrs Erlynne (Redgrave). By doing so, Lady W nearly repeats long-lost mum’s big mistake of abandoning the marital home for a dashing lover and social exclusion. Her fan, a birthday present from hubby (David Yelland), becomes the prop by which she is almost ruined and then ultimately saved.

As Mrs Erlynne, Redgrave appears at first too bold and slightly wooden, but she warms to her character and her child in the second half, demonstrating her adeptness at pregnant pauses and letting small actions speak louder than words. Richardson is pretty, perky and visibly delicate as the innocent Lady, even if her moral outrage is harder to stomach.

The real stand-out performances, however, come in the smaller roles. Jack Davenport is wonderful as worldly but wounded Lord Darlington. During the play’s most dramatic scene, in which he declares his love for Lady W, his desperation is heart-wrenching. Meanwhile, Withers as the busybody Duchess and McCallum as the hair-dyed and lisping Lord Augustus deliver comic value in spades.

At times, you yearn for Wilde’s script to take an alternative dramatic turn but, hey, more than 100 years on, you can’t really complain, and you can’t help but marvel when some of the world’s most famous epigrams pop out like unexpected jewels, more glittering in their original context. “We’re all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars”, a cynic is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” and many more – magnificent.

This production may leave some things to be desired – a smidgen of updating, more rehearsal time (on the night, there were a clutch of fluffed lines), less pastels and lace in the set (care of John Gunter in daytime TV mode) – but there’s plenty here to satisfy too in an amusing, and at times genuinely moving, evening’s entertainment.

– Terri Paddock