Fluting, acerbic, but also surprisingly warm, Stephen Fry’s Lady Bracknell is the trump card of Max Webster’s hyper-camp reading of Oscar Wilde’s peerless comedy. Handsomely remounted in the West End with a new cast, the show feels more effortful, more try-hard, than it did at the National last November. Until Fry’s two appearances, that is.
Resplendent in purple or emerald organza, he cruises on stage like a bustle-clad battleship, firing witticisms into the audience with devastating accuracy. There was understandable harrumphing when it was announced yet another man had been cast in one of the great female roles. But Fry is a Wilde expert, possessed of exquisite comic timing and modulation. His precision shows up the tendency of some other cast members to gabble.
Webster outs and exaggerates the shallowly hidden gay subtext of Wilde’s play, making it a hectic place of sexual and gender fluidity. It opens with Olly Alexander’s young bachelor Algernon presiding over a party of drag kings and queens in an abbreviated pink ballgown.
It’s OTT but speaks to Wilde’s radical sexual frankness and his delight in artifice. This is, after all, a story of two men who invent secret identities to engage in frowned-upon naughtiness, and two young women who construct throbbing interior fantasy lives, to escape Victorian convention.
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Algy and his frenemy Jack (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) are so obviously gay young men about town that one presumes they are looking for marriages of convenience to Cecily (Jessica Whitehurst) and Gwendolen (Kitty Hawthorne). But there’s a sense here that these preternaturally witty, self-possessed characters can be suddenly upended by love or lust, that anyone could end up with anyone.
Gwendolen is forever fanning her, ahem, ardour to cool it down. Raunch bubbles up to subvert Cecily’s cut-glass accent. Both predatorily survey the audience for alternative partners and enjoy a sudden hot smooch during a cake-smeared catfight. Jack’s exasperated verbal and physical tussles with the posturing, pleased-with-himself Algy threaten to turn erotic. Which is genuinely transgressive, given the play’s final twist.
The knowingness of Webster’s production, including pop-culture references, queer in-jokes and regular breaking of the fourth wall, feels closer to panto now than it did at the National. More worryingly, Wildean jokes that should slip down as frictionlessly as an oyster stick in the throat. You can actually see Alexander and Stewart-Jarrett watching the trajectory of lines that fail to land. Their flappily outrageous body language feels forced.
The women fare better. Relative newcomer Hawthorne brings hilarity to this Gwendolen’s blend of raunch and decorous snobbery. Cecily’s surprise at her own emotions is seen in the tics and smirks that skitter across Whitehurst’s face. The staging gains a headlong, no-brakes energy once all the main cast is assembled at the end.
Everyone bar Fry is upstaged by veteran clown Hayley Carmichael as Algy’s butler Lane and Jack’s servant Merriman; the former a sly and subtle factotum, the latter a bewildered ancient who seems to have wandered in from revolutionary France after a 105-year nap. Carmichael seemed overwhelmed by a deserved standing ovation on opening night.
The whole thing looks gorgeous, unfolding with advancing degrees of opulence. Set and costume designer Rae Smith starkly suspends a handbag in front of the stage curtain in the pre-set in a reference to Lady Bracknell’s most famous line. Algy’s Albany suite is relatively staid, the better to show off his fabulous wardrobe of printed jackets, lace shirts and pink socks.
The garden at Jack’s country estate looks like a Fragonard painting redone by Pierre et Gilles, with garish roses atop apple-green Astroturf banks. One of the better running gags involves Gwendolen’s difficulty in taking a hump of barely six inches. Inside Jack’s house, eyes, hands and mouths are drawn to the genitals of huge nude sculptures.
The curtain call is taken in fanned, rainbow Mardi Gras costumes with Fry tossing green carnations into the audience. A subtle nod to Wilde’s buttonhole expression of homosexuality, to end an often unsubtle production.
Booking to 10 Jan, noelcowardtheatre.co.uk
