The Bunbury Company of Players have come to town! And they are bringing their revival of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant satire on Victorian hypocrisy The Importance of Being Earnest. What larks!
Wilde’s belovèd play is a complicated comic farce set round the shenanigans of two upper class single chaps: the stolid dependable John Worthing (Martin Jarvis) and playboy Algernon Moncrieff (Nigel Havers). Each has created a fictional character to facilitate their getting up to no good, each in their own way. Bunbury is Algernon’s fictitious ailing chum and Earnest is John’s fictitious naughty brother. These wealthy ‘work shy fops’ have a town and country life that facilitates their fibbing but when they fall in love with a couple of suitable ‘ge’ls’ their web of albeit pretty innocent lies starts to unravel under the formidable eye of Lady Bracknell (Siân Phillips).
At first glance, this looks like it might be a cringe worthy and terribly ‘mod’n’ English update of a treasured classic with Nigel Havers making mobile calls wearing hideous red suede trainers and a farce playing out over cucumber sandwiches, costume ‘drama’ in the form of a ‘shrunk’ jacket and Am Dram affairs. It soon becomes clear that this is a play within a play with the Bunbury Players reprising a favourite Wilde play. This device allowed the suspension of disbelief at the comic sight of an older Mr Worthing cart horsing around to pass himself off as a 29 year old!
The gorgeous art nouveau style set, with its lavish peacock motifs and what looks like versions of the famous Glasgow rose, immediately strikes a Scottish eye as being based on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House in Helensburgh that was built for Blackie the publisher. In fact, the set is based on Blackwell House in the Lake District by Mackay Baillie Scott. Not a nod to the Scottish leg of the tour after all. Either way, it is stunning, detailed and perfectly hits the cusp of a time of change.
This star studded cast is in fine form with Carmen Du Sautoy striking Jane Avrilesque angular poses as the stylish Gwendolyn Fairfax; Nigel Anthony being nonchalance personified in the roles of servants Lane, Merriman and the hen pecked George; Nigel Havers delivering Wilde’s beautifully crafted lines with complete insouciance as Algernon and creating a jolly double act full of bell tinkling and winking with Martin Jarvis as John (they even got away with a brave inclusion of a reference to ‘North Britain’ when listing someone’s property ownership without even a discreet audible gasp!); Rosalind Ayres and David Shaw-Parker as respectively a quite vital Miss Prism and a lively Rev Canon Chasuble, the unlikely will–they-won’t-they pair. But it is the magnificent Siân Phillips who as the indomitable Lady Bracknell steals the show as she delivers the glorious text to the manner born.
It is utterly affirming to see people not in the first flush of youth still strutting their stuff with such evident relish. In fact the whole company looked as though they were having a great lark together in this thoroughly enjoyable double reprise!
Tuesday 10 to Saturday 14 November 2015