A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE.
London
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
by Oscar Wilde
Haymarket Theatre To 31 January 2004
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm
Runs 2hr 35min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 901 3356
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 September
Elegant and accomplished but unbalanced as a moral debate.The ace director lacking the gift of comedy stumbles from dramatic heights to clumsiness when it comes to raising laughs. Devices that ought to work lumber lumpily around the stage. Audiences watch in stupified amazement as actors mug and expostulate. This affliction applies even to Royal Shakespeareans in chief, present or past. Guess what I thought of this show.
Not that badly, in fact. Not as badly as Noble's mirthless Comedy of Errors many years ago at Stratford, which bored the underwear so far off me it hasn't been located yet. But Wilde works through wit, with which Noble can work with. Several performances find detail in the dialogue's elegant sweep. Occasionally, it's an unfortunately modern innuendo. But mostly not.
Wilde's social comedies (ie not Earnest) foreground moral quandaries against brilliantly epigrammatic chorus-like episodes from characters whose dramatic function is to be living social scenery. There are fine examples of this, especially Caroline Blakiston's proto-Lady Bracknell, for whom a revolution, you feel, would be merely cause for lapidary comment. Blakiston's wondrous effortlessly insouciant hauteur - here's someone for whom the world clearly has all the time there is for her to utter her simplicities is deliciously offset by the easy-quashed muttered objections of Ralph Nossek's precisely-gradated Sir John destined forever to be denied more attractive female company.
Prunella Scales, too, is delightfully unexpected, bringing a sweet vocal calm, and balm, to Lady Hunstanton though sometimes with unhelpful hesitancies damaging the potential impact.
It's in to the foreground - innocence v experience, purity v corruption there's unbalance. Joanne Pearce gives her worldly weary character force and Rupert Everett is very un-Wildean, to fine effect. Standing slightly back like a Regency Dandy, or assertively poking his face forward, his Illingworth incarnates assured selfishness. Against him, Samantha Bond has a gradually strengthening moral force, but the voice of unadulterated purity, Rachael Stirling's young American beauty becomes increasingly strained and tonally monotonous in the final act, just where she needs to carry greatest conviction.
The generalised green setting suggest Noble had little interest in this aspect of his production; the falling leaves are emptily autumnal.
Lady Caroline Pontefract: Caroline Blakiston
Hester Worsley: Rachael Stirling
Sir John Pontefract: Ralph Nossek
Lady Hunstanton: Prunella Scales
Gerald Arbuthnot: Julian Ovenden
Mrs Allonby: Joanne Pearce
Lady Stutfield: Elizabeth Garvie
Mr Kelvil MP: John Normington
Lord Illingworth: Rupert Graves
Lord Alfred Rufford: Jasper Jacob
Francis: Richard Teverson
Mrs Arbuthnot: Samantha Bond
Archdeacon Daubeny: Peter Cellier
Farquhar: Richard Syms
Alice: Sharon Scogings
Director: Adrian Noble
Designer: Peter McIntosh
Lighting: Rick Fisher
Sound: Paul Arditti
Dialect coach: Penny Dyer
2003-09-23 17:48:46