Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork
For comedy to work it has to be taken seriously, a fact which seems to have been forgotten in this production. Director and cast certainly do their best to entertain and on one level they succeed: the scene is bright, the speeches witty, the costumes acceptable and all the players more than competent.
The calm elegance of Jim Queally’s design, with its stucco flourishes and ebullient floral decorations, provides the atmosphere of leisured charm essential to the narrative of one of Oscar Wilde’s most famous plays. These elements are a veneer. Underneath the polish, as underneath the carpet of Wilde’s brilliance, lie the grit and dust of the social sweepings of his world. These are the real fabric of his plot and to make such characters as the disreputable Mrs Erlynne credible – both originally in 1892 and now – these are what have to be exposed. If this is champagne, it is served in a poisoned chalice.
Instead director Michael Twomey has allowed his actors to skate comfortably along the surface of what can seem a very glossy and superficial play. Young, idealistic and stubborn as only the idealistic young can be, Lady Windermere discovers that her husband, who has just sent her a beautiful fan as a birthday present, has been seeing, and paying, the mysterious Mrs Erlynne. True to the credo that it takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing, her response is to elope with the seductive Lord Darlington, an event which would mean her social ruin and from which she is saved by the intervention of the supposed villainess.
Wilde’s plots can hide inconsistencies but here they are exposed: how could the fallen woman – for it is she – hope to regain social acceptance without being recognised? Although Lady Windermere believes that life is a sacrament and not a speculation and is introduced with her infant in her arms, why is there no further mention of the baby until Mrs Erlynne much later recalls the cost of abandoning home and child as she had done herself? These and other contradictions set the questions seething, but there is no attempt in this reading to address them. Perhaps it is easier now to regard this play as an illustrated lecture on the hypocrisy of Wilde’s own milieu.
Perhaps that environment is too far from ours for his bitterness to enhance those gutter-and-stars, price of everything and value of nothing aphorisms; perhaps it is impossible to suspend belief, rather than disbelief, and to forget that we know the end of Wilde’s own story. Even if we don’t, the hard core of this escapist piece has been allowed, in fact, to escape. Whatever the answers may be, in this case Rose Donovan, Vanessa Hyde, Ian McGuirk and Conor Dwane deliver committed performances without ever a pause for reflection; it is only in the more obviously comic roles that Ronnie O’Shaughnessy and David Coon provide the subtle conviction needed to illuminate the conflicting layers of the drama.
– Runs until January 29
