A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE. To 20 October.

Pitlochry

A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
by Oscar Wilde

Pitlochry Festival Theatre In rep to 20 October 2006
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 30 Aug, 13, 30 Sept 2pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

TICKETS: 01796 484626
www.pitlochry.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 August

Despite its Archdeacon, a curate's egg.

At first sight Oscar Wilde's play might seem a hybrid of glittering, one-liner strewn social satire and serious social drama dealing with late Victorian theatre's favourite issue, the woman-with-a-past. But Wilde was always a careful play-builder and under its immediate wit even the apparently plot-free opening act prepares the social and moral ground for events that subsequently unfold. The link's evident up to the play's closing line (as brilliantly apt in its way as Earnest's), with its ironic reference back to the end of act one indicating how far the moral landscape has changed.

Ben Twist's revival clearly understands the play's substance, but this ending is a final example of how partially his production expresses it. The jolt Wilde gives is more-than-sufficient by itself and doesn't need supporting by a scene change and slow-fading lights; the audience had not only begun, but had evidently done with its applause before all this technology had done its interfering business. (Fiona Watt's lacklustre set is a disappointment given Pitlochry's usual visual standards, making a point only in the 3rd act's stuffed animals suggesting the beast in men and women).

Before then the social landscape emerges only hazily. Each performance seeming a separate comic turn, too many of them false and the scene therefore seeming static. Jenny Lee is natural and amusing as the memory-lapsed Lady Hunstanton, but Helen Logan and Jacqueline Dutoit only lightly touch the surface of the glacial Mrs Allonby and commanding Lady Caroline, while Matthew Lloyd Davies seems to assume a Member of Parliament on stage has to be a characterless caricature. Martyn James' uxorious Archdeacon, despite a Nosferatu-like walk, demonstrates how to present a delightfully full-coloured caricature.

Problems on the moral side too, with Michele Gallagher's young American "puritan" Hester pounding out her speeches with little sense of any thought behind them; even someone so morally certain (pertinent in these days of loudly-expressed American fundamentalism) has to assemble the appropriate certainties. Karen Davies' otherwise forceful Mrs Arbuthnot is let down by a sourness of facial expression which blankets-out some of her moral quandary.

Fortunately, Richard Galazka has the easy optimism of youthful innocence as her son, while Jonathan Coote (whose velvet-resonant voice is a treaurable possession for an actor) contrasts him with the ease of confident social success, something that doesn't entirely desert him in adversity. They help make this a production of some significance

Lady Caroline Pontefract: Jacqueline Dutoit
Miss Hester Worsely: Michele Gallagher
Sir John Pontefract: Ronnie Simon
Lady Hunstanton: Jenny Lee
Francis: Anthony Glennon
Gerald Arbuthnot: Richard Galazka
Mrs Allonby: Helen Logan
Lady Stutfield: Flora Berkeley
Mr Kelvil MP: Matthew Lloyd Davies
Lord Illingworth: Jonathan Coote
Lord Alfred Rufford: Jonathan Dryden Taylor
Mrs Arbuthnot: Karen Davies
Ven Archdeacon Daubeny DD: Martyn James
Farquhar: Robin Harvey Edwards
Alice: Amy Ewbank

Director: Ben Twist
Designer/Costume: Fiona Watt
Lighting: Ace McCarron
Sound: Ronnie McConnell
Dialect coach: Alex Gillon

2006-08-28 11:57:36