Reviews

The Importance of Being Earnest (tour – Bury St Edmunds, Theatre Royal)

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19 November 2012

Gilding the lily can be a dangerous as
well as counter-productive exercise. Take Michael Cabot‘s new
production of Wilde‘s The Importance of Being Earnest
for London Classic Theatre. Cabot and his designers Kerry Bradley
and Katja Krzesinska keep the acting fairly naturalistic, the
costumes in period and the dialogue fizzing along at a brisk pace but
limit furnishings to an assortment of chairs – each suited to one
of the main characters – with a peripatetic tea trolley and the
minimum of garden furniture for the second act.

Most of those chairs are manoeuvred
into place so that the characters can subside onto them when
necessary by Jonathan Ashley doubling the laconic Lane and the
seen-better-days Merriman. If Ashley Cook‘s Moncrieff is a
thoroughly laid-back young-man-about-town, Paul Sandys‘ Worthing is
the exact opposite – all nervous energy which twists into
sharpness; you feel that he’s his own worst enemy just when he’s most
in need of friendly support.

His main opponent, of course, is Lady
Bracknell. Judith Paris makes her a formidable dowager, injecting a
lethal double-dose of non-comprehension and disdain into the phrase
“an alliance with a parcel!”. Making her
professional début, Helen Keeley‘s Gwendolen is very much her
mother’s daughter; one feels sure that she will rule the roost if and
when she marries Worthing. Helen Phillips as Cecily is a quicksilver minx with a finely developed sense of just what she can get away
with.

Both Laoisha O’Callaghan‘s Miss Prism
and Peter Cadden‘s Dr Chasuble are fleshed-out portraits, rather
than caricatures. There’s an air of driven intensity about
O’Callaghan which makes it plain that Prism’s just the sort of person
whose attention will be more on what she wants – be that publishing
her manuscript novel or leading Chasuble to his own altar – than
on the minutiae of the job for which she’s actually been hired.

All in all, it’s an interesting reading
of a comedy which is so well made that its sheer nonsense carries it
through any manner of stagings. This one is, however, just a touch
too clever for its own good.