The Importance of Being Earnest review – Ncuti Gatwa and Sharon D Clarke in the National Theatre's party-like production

It’s panto season at the National Theatre.  Max Webster’s production of Oscar Wilde’s most famous play is colourful, cross-dressing, brash and often very funny. The trouble is that the importance of its author sometimes vanishes in the mayhem.

Designer Rae Smith sets the tongue in cheek meta-theatrical tone from the very beginning by providing an ornate white proscenium arch across the Lyttelton’s stage;  a small handbag hangs tantalisingly in front of the lush red curtains. When they pull back, it is to reveal Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa in corset and pink satin dress and gloves, draped over a grand piano, winking knowingly at the audience.

He’s surrounded by men dressed as women and women dressed as men, slinking in choreographer Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s evocation of the hidden gay society in which Wilde lived, and which – months after Earnest opened in 1895 – led to his imprisonment under laws that criminalised sex between men.

The subtext of Wilde’s subtle depiction of two attractive young men who lead double lives in order fully to express themselves has become the text of Webster’s vision. And when the play proper begins with Gatwa’s charismatically confident Algernon and Hugh Skinner’s attractively dishevelled Jack swopping aphorisms and plans while eating cucumber sandwiches, that broad brush approach continues.

Wilde should seem effortless but here there’s a terrible sense of trying hard, emphasising every double entendre and inventing a few extra.  Its not the irreverence that’s the problem; the anachronisms (Jack’s ward Cecily sings Miley Cyrus; Skinner and Gatwa hum James Blunt) and Gatwa’s cheeky collusion with the audience work pretty well.

But the physical comedy and the over-emphasis on the obvious (Jack and Algernon say darling to each other and kiss when they should be kissing their respective lovers Gwendolen and Cecily, for example) are added at the expense of the wit inherent in Wilde’s words. The text seems less important than accommodating the next bum joke, or a slip on some fake grass.

A really strong cast – with Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo as a wickedly independent Gwendolen and Eliza Scanlen as an unusually determined Cecily – are left skating on the surface without ever mining the sheer joy of the language.

Then along comes Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell, resplendent in buttercup yellow and a bemedaled sash, to show everybody exactly how it’s done. She is utterly wonderful, turning the character into a disdainfully magnificent matriarch, contempt for the world and its imperfections dripping from every line.

When she discovers Jack’s origins in a handbag, she makes the word – the most famous two syllables in the English language – unusually quiet and carefully pronounced, reserving her full force for her refusal to allow her daughter Gwendolen to “form an alliance with a parcel.” The final act, when she is centre stage, benefits from her absolute command.

She’s ably supported by two other older hands in the shape of Richard Cant as the bumbling Chasuble and Amanda Lawrence’s dithering Miss Prism, and by the fact that as the evening progresses the cast seem to relax a little, and Skinner in particular finds brilliant comic form, collapsing like a popped balloon when Lady Bracknell confronts him.

The carnival-like curtain call is as loud and over the top as the rest of the evening. It’s all very enjoyable and I wouldn’t want to put anyone off seeing it when it screens in cinemas in February.  But it is as if Webster, faced with his debut at the National, has decided to use every trick in the box and see what works. The result is outrageous, but only occasionally insightful and slightly less fun than it ought to be given the talent assembled on stage.