King’s Theatre, Edinburgh – until 5 October 2019
Reviewed by James Knight
4****
“You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded.”
Oscar Wilde’s suitably scathing social comedy comes to the King’s this week, and in the time of Time’s Up and #MeToo, it couldn’t feel more relevant.
At a party at Lady Hunstanton’s estate, the upper classes arrive for a typical afternoon and evening of wining, dining and witty remarks. The young Gerald Arbuthnot (Tim Gibson) has been offered a job as secretary to the witty, daring and amoral Lord Illingworth (Mark Meadows), a position that would grant him high status in ‘society’. However, when his mother, Mrs Arbuthnot (Katy Stephens) arrives later, scandalous secrets are revealed – Gerald is actually Lord Illingworth’s illegitimate son. Illingworth had courted Mrs Arbuthnot in their youth, and after conceiving a child, refused to marry her. And so, the tensions rise and battle lines are drawn – how does Mrs Arbuthnot keep her son, whom she has had to raise alone in a world that would shun her if the truth came out, but keep the man who wronged her as far away as possible.
It is clear whose side the audience should be on. It is clear whose side Oscar Wilde was on. The play shows the hypocrisy and double standards enacted by the upper classes and lays bare Mrs Arbuthnot’s pain. In the Victorian era, scandals such as hers could easily destroy her life and her son’s. Wilde usually has a stand-in for himself in his plays, the lackadaisical figure who pokes and prods at the conventions of society, the lounging rogue who punctures arguments with effortless wit, and here, the stand-in is Illingworth. But here, instead of being admirable, Illingworth gradually turns into a vile man, his character laid bare by Mrs Arbuthnot. His attempted kiss on Hester Worsley (Georgia Landers), his outrageous flirting with the equally amoral Mrs Allonby (Emma Amos) reveal a man who in this day and age would be named in the same sentence as Weinstein, Affleck and the rest of them. Thankfully, Mrs Arbuthnot does get the last word here, just as you think Illingworth is getting too many of them.
Katy Stephens and Mark Meadows’ scenes together are electric, firing shots at each other laced with undisguised loathing. Wilde’s acerbic wit is on fine form here, even if at other times his words are delivered with less finesse – more than a few of his more famous lines were delivered with a pointed ‘look, this is one is REALLY clever’ almost-fourth-wall-break, rendering it more pantomime than pointed jab at society’s failings.
The pace of the play is swift, each act a breezy 55 minutes, the huge set changes covered ably by Roy Hudd’s Reverend Daubney and other members of the cast performing classic music hall a la post-dinner entertainment.
A highly relevant look at the treatment of women both then and now, ‘A Woman of No Importance’ remains topical and enjoyable.