Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford – until 2 November 2019
Reviewed by Antonia Hebbert
4****
At first sight this Oscar Wilde play feels like a lighthearted country house comedy. Aristocratic guests exchange classic Wildean witticisms in quick fire succession – it’s amazing how many famous lines there are. It’s all smart and brittle and clever, so much so that you sometimes want to press a pause button to give you time to think about the last one-liner. But in Act II a serious drama emerges, when naïve young Gerald (Tim Gibson) is revealed to be the illegitimate son of predatory Lord Illingworth (Mark Meadows). Gerald’s devoted mother (Katy Stephens) is ‘a fallen woman’, who has lived in shame, while Illingworth has enjoyed every luxury and inherited a title.
It’s almost as if it’s two plays in parallel. Oscar Wilde is suddenly looking here at the gaping inequality of men and women in 19th-century society. It’s hard to imagine now just how powerless women were then, but Katy Stephens as Mrs Arbuthnot manages to convey a sense of a devastated life, without quite falling into melodrama. Meanwhile other characters continue to provide witty Wildean exchanges, led by Emma Amos as the feline Mrs Allonby, who treats relations between men and women as a sort scintillating fencing match, in which a clever woman can more than hold her own.
Some of the funniest moments come from characters who don’t do the brilliant repartee – Liza Goddard is a delight as forgetful Lady Hunstanton, and Roy Hudd (yes, it is he – comedy royalty at 83 years old) is a perfect Reverend Daubeny, assuring everyone of his wife’s wellbeing while revealing more and more about her terrible state of health. Between each act Roy Hudd leads a cheery comic song, which gives time to change Jonathan Fensom’s handsome scenery, but also helps to bridge the different moods of the play.
In the end, Mrs Arbuthnot gets the last word. A very straitlaced American character (Georgia Landers) who has been terribly boring in the witty-repartee side of the play, turns up to save the day on the serious-drama side – she is conveniently a millionaire and is going to marry Gerald. It isn’t at all clear where Wilde stands – he can see society’s wickedness but finds moralising deadly dull; he is drawn to the glamorously bad but makes his Illingworth extraordinarily nasty in the end. It’s all very curious and interesting, and one of a series of Wilde productions by director Dominic Dromgoole.