FringeReview UK 2024
The Importance of Being Earnest
National Theatre, London
Genre: classical, Comedy, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: National Theatre, Lyttelton
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
The Importance of Being Earnest has always been pink. You know it has. And Rae Smith’s set bursting with Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa in pink playing the grand (real pianist Cat Beveridge) sings itself psychedelic in this National revival at the Lyttleton directed by Max Webster till January 25th.
Unmissable.
Review
The Importance of Being Earnest has always been pink. You know it has. And Rae Smith’s set bursting with Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa in pink playing the grand (real pianist Cat Beveridge) sings itself psychedelic in this National revival at the Lyttleton directed by Max Webster till January 25th.
Though the parquet floor remains throughout, there’s little between the nod to Algernon’s drawing room and Act Two’s determinedly overbright garden and sky ambushed with rose-bursts, lit by Jon Clark (whose mastery of the spectral is little called for). Only in the final library scene like the 2022 revival here of The Corn is Green, do we absorb hallucinated realism: two staircases, serried ranks of books, patio windows. DJ Wolde’s music lightly amps up one fin-de-siecle to another.
It’s all turned up with vocal projection, enunciation and of course camp. Earnest has never been so earnest, that code-word finally un-Enigma’d. Literally. As Jack finally dusts off army lists with a “G.. .A… Y… S… M” the semaphore couldn’t be louder though Webster’s claims to have reworked Act 4 are overblown. It’s pretty well, straight textually.
Jack (Hugh Skinner) plays straight-man too to Gatwa’s Algernon shimmying backwards, which forces Jack to all sorts of erotic kiss-chase (in effect) with a cigarette case. It’s a delicious pas de deux. Their clothes speak their degrees of liberation. Gatwa’s a far more flamboyant cross-dresser: the license of this Algernon’s young unattached flaneur with no cares is to savour every delivery with a hint of flounce or whiff of pirouette. Skinner’s glum riposte as smokeless Jack is to consume cucumber sandwiches before confronting Gwendolen.
Of course cucumber. Performative gender-roles calibrate camp but also a spectrum of sexual expression. Jack’s possibly bisexuality subdues and integrates him. So their light kiss seals something private before the couples’ dance.
So when Gwendolen (Ronke Adékoluéjó in pink) and still later Cecily (Eliza Scanlen constrained in rustic Paisley) burst in, one wonders why anyone bothers. A halfpenny drops: pink marriage allows people to pursue whom they like. That’s one reading. Another is to allow both levels at once, as Wilde does: Webster doesn’t guy Wilde’s balances.
Full technicolour arrives with the great Sharon D Clarke mixing stern fairy godmother and mischievous grand dame. Her canary-yellow, Caribbean-voiced Lady Bracknell extends the lightest of inflections to Adékoluéjó whose Gwendolen seems more determined to ascend London society’s cut-glass. Here Gwendolen romps in role-play, as if acting out a premonitory feeling that with Jack, she might pursue real affairs elsewhere.
Adékoluéjó is radiant with warmth and possibility. It’s not only Cicely who’ll develop in all sorts of interesting directions. There’s rich cultural seams here that might be explored too, though the confection admittedly could get bogged down in 1895 too quickly.
Scanlen’s etiquette-unbroken Cecily flourishes in some Webster-isms: things that might be ad-libbed in a production are given a newly-prepared text. Which is pushing it.
There’s even a consummation. Just before Bracknell returns, both couples’ reconciliations tangle into a polyamorous moment. Who’s embracing who, or even if all at once, is a confection of flounces.
Julian Bleach is an exquisitely disdainful Lane, and as an ancient bewigged Merriman crashing about with a gong, careering out of One Man, Two Guvnors, or Faydeau neat. Richard Cant’s Chasuble is as erotically charged as Chasuble’s age allows, and Amanda Lawrence flourishes Miss Prism with all the right grace-notes. Her handbag moment is infinitely more extended than Lady Bracknell’s. Clarke inflects – and owns – her own disdain with gravelly dismissal.
A hard-worked ensemble (shout for Joyce Henderson’s physical comedy) seem a luxury: Shereener Browne, Josmine Kerr, Gillian McCafferty, Elliot Pritchard and John Vernon seem outside the essential dynamics of Webster’s dramaturgy.
A glorious texting of subtexts, subtlety still finds its apotheosis in pause and gesture, but like Bunbury it is soon quite exploded. It’s how we might think of this production after an extraordinary final apparition linking back to the opening. But I defy anyone to predict quite how. Unmissable.
Directed by Max Webster, Set and Costume Designer Rae Smith, Lighting Designer Jon Clarke, Composer DJ Wolde ,Sound Designer Nicola T Chang, Movement Director Corrie-Anne Ingrouille, Physical Comedy Advisor Joyce Henderson, Intimacy Co-ordinator Ingrid Mackinnon,
Casting Alistair Coomer CDG and Chloe Blake, Dialect Coach Hazel Holder, Voice Coach Shereen Ibrahim
