Dominic Cavendish reviews A Woman of No Importance at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.
What a difference a good director makes. In less capable hands, I imagine that Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance (1893), which strays into the West End relatively rarely, might come across as so much contortedly clever talk chasing after melodramatic dividends; the unspeakable in pursuit of the unedifying, to recoin one of the play's most frequently quoted epigrams.
But Adrian Noble grasps the genius of the writing so adroitly that the piece reveals itself in its true form, as a scintillating drama of ideas. Coming, as it does, hot on the heels of his acclaimed revival of Brand at the Haymarket, it reinforces the sense, palpable in this production, of Wilde as a closet Ibsenite.
Noble can't disguise the old-fashioned nature of the revelation at the evening's centre: dandyish Lord Illingworth (Rupert Graves) gives the handsome, young, impoverished Gerald Arbuthnot a job as his private secretary after taking a shine to him at a house-party hosted by Lady Hunstanton (Prunella Scales); he doesn't count on the boy's mother turning up and turning out to be the woman he abandoned to ignominy 20 years previously. The lad, who warmly reciprocates his mentor's affection, discovers the truth in a moment as messy as it is histrionic.
Here, though, the play's intrinsic power is allowed to shine through clunky convention. In part, it derives from the crackling tension between refined rules of conversational engagement in the drawing-room and the scandalously unequal treatment of male and female sexual indiscretions in society at large. But Noble also recognises that, with the lightest of touches, Wilde is digging deeply into insolubly complex questions about morality, personality and forgiveness.
In her clinging attempt to keep Gerald from his father's influence, Samantha Bond's Mrs Arbuthnot, dressed in mournful black, her dammed-up bitterness first trickling, then flooding forth, recalls Mrs Alving desperately coddling her syphilis-ridden son in Ghosts. For his part, Julian Ovenden compellingly relays Gerald's ardent desire to live his youth to the full, while growing to an appalled recognition that he must not repeat or compound the sins of his father. Graves — as unageing as Dorian Gray — proves himself yet again an outstandingly unobtrusive stage actor; his glinting, leisurely assurance as Illingworth suggests at once caddishness and persuasive maturity, even sensitivity.
The production's only unintended level of irony resides in Scales's unfortunate tendency to compound her character's scattiness by forgetting lines. But elsewhere there is nothing but acting of the highest order: especially from Rachael Stirling's young American visitor, scorching in her attack on her hosts' snobbery, embodied best by Caroline Blakiston's hilariously disdainful Lady Caroline. Raising the teacup of comedy aloft, while holding steady to the saucer of tragic seriousness, Noble's high-class production is, quite simply, a must-see.
