Oscar Wilde's comedy is so malleable and stuffed with wit that it has proved indestructible over the years.
Alas, it lies battered and bleeding after this assault by David Fielding. Fielding has gone for an all-male version, and the programme talks of "the importance of queering earnest", arguing that the widely discussed subtext of the play's secret gay code - including references to Bunburying and cucumber sandwiches (and Cecily as a Victorian word for male prostitute) - which would have significance to homosexuals in the audience, has largely been marginalised. Perhaps that is because it is a subtext, and Wilde intended it to be implicit rather than explicit.
Making everything so crudely obvious - and, my, is it obvious, from the pink walls with cucumber motif to a Miss Whiplash version of Miss Prism to the camp way of representing male gay sexuality as effeminate and female sexuality as grotesque and monstrous - not only damages the structure of the comedy, but turns out to be considerably less subversive than Wilde's own layering of the text with gender-bending reversals of expectation and critique of the institution of marriage. The play now screams pinkly and limply at you, rather than seduces you.
We have concept Shakespeare and there is no reason why we shouldn't have concept Wilde. But if you impose a concept on a play, you have to make sure it doesn't squash it flat. The cast must have room to manoeuvre and create flesh and blood characters. Simon Trinder as Gwendolen and Michael Fitzgerald as Lady Bracknell come off best, the rest flap about heroically like fish out of water.
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