On the way into the theatre there is a pop-up display of Victorian photographic portraits. The sitters are stiff in that slow shutter-speed way, holding their gaze in their top hats, frock coats and crinolines. They are all people of colour and, as the curators have it, are a “missing chapter”.
The Black Chronicles exhibition by London gallery Autograph is a good introduction to this staging of Oscar Wilde’s high-society comedy. Director Denzel Westley-Sanderson has taken a piece of traditionally white culture and claimed it as his own. Like the photographs, his production for English Touring Theatre, Leeds Playhouse and the Rose theatre has all the familiar features of The Importance of Being Earnest: the superficiality, the snootiness and the epigrammatic wit. It just happens to be performed by an all-black cast.
And a funny ensemble they are too. In a production commissioned after he won the RTST Sir Peter Hall director award, Westley-Sanderson pays attention to the formality of Oscar Wilde’s genteel world of afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches while giving it a playful kick. When the characters can’t get what they want, they tend to chase each other on and off the stage, as if they have slipped into a slapstick farce. It is as if the tweed suits and unyielding dresses cannot quite restrain the naughty children wearing them.
Only the imposing figure of Lady Bracknell can bring them to order. Played by Daniel Jacob, moonlighting from his job as drag queen Vinegar Strokes, she is so wrapped up in swathes of purple fabric that Phoebe Campbell’s Cecily can get nowhere near her face and has to make do with an air kiss. When she speaks, it is with a rasping authority.
The knockabout games and up-front attitude mean not all of Wilde’s witticisms land as they would with more icy reserve. But there is compensation enough in the entertaining turns from Abiola Owokoniran as a camp and conversational Algernon, Justice Ritchie as an out-of-his-depth Jack and Adele James as a sexually forthright Gwendolen.
At Leeds Playhouse until 17 September. On tour until 12 November.
