Conall Morrison has delivered the summer crowd-pleaser the embattled Abbey needed: a fun and sumptuous staging of Wilde's familiar comedy. Oddly, the fact that it is performed entirely by men hardly impinges - this is a production that successfully claims Wilde as gay, but stops short of queering the play.
Morrison has composed a short prologue wherein Wilde, three months before his death in Paris, is shunned in a fashionable cafe and, left to his own thoughts, imagines his most successful play as performed by the cafe's denizens.
Morrison's cleverest move is to have the same actor play Wilde and Lady Bracknell - the embodiment of the hypocritical society that was the target of the playwright's satire. But beyond the obvious humour of a large man wearing an even larger frock, Alan Stanford does not offer new insights into Bracknell's stentorian absurdity: what we get is, ironically, a straight-up Bracknell, and indeed a fairly straight reading of the play overall.
To an extent this is the right way to play it: Wilde told his original actors to say their lines in earnest; indeed, acknowledging the silliness of the play's concerns would topple the house of cards entirely. But one wishes here that the sexual politics that fuel the conceit were made more visible through the artifice: when the couples finally kiss, we get prissy pecks rather than lustful snogs.
The production only really reaches its potential in Gwendolyn and Cecily's second-act battle of wits, as the wonderful Tadhg Murphy and Patrick Moy very nearly convince as simpering girls. Sabine Dargent and Joan O'Clery's set and costumes are delightfully OTT, and the audience whoops it up happily, but there is an edge missing.
· Until September 24. Box office: 353 1-878-7222.
