A Woman of No Importance
Oscar Wilde
Directed by Colette Dockery
Tower Theatre
Star rating: 3.5
Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play is a strange beast. For the first three acts it feels cynically frivolous and it’s packed with familiar Wildean aphorisms such as fox hunting being “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. Then it darkens and becomes much more serious. There are issues for any company trying to stage it in that it’s pretty wordy – a Wilde trademark – and, by today’s standards, it uses an extravagantly large cast of twelve so you have to work very hard to stop it being static with people merely standing around. Colette Dockery and her actors get round these challenges most of the time by making good use of Tower Theatre’s quite large triangular playing space configured with several entry points.
We’re at a house party at the home of wealthy Lady Jane Hunstanton (Alison Liney – good). Young Gerald Arbuthnot (Luke Yianni – convincing), the son of a relatively humble neighbour, has been offered the post of secretary to Lord Illingworth (Jonathan Buckingham – more anon). It’s a fine opportunity. As the play progresses, reasons emerge why he cannot, to most people’s surprise and disappointment, accept the position.
There’s some pleasing acting in this production. Bethany Collins is strong as Hester Worsley, the young American visitor who, clear-sightedly, unpicks the English class system while at the same time being virginally appealing – to more than one man in the group. And Roslyn Cuffe Kelly is fun as the earnest, repetitive, quite dim Lady Stutfield.
It is, however, Dixi Talyor who really shines. As Mrs Arbuthnot in the final scenes she finds gritty determination and skilfully understated anguish as we work up to that well signalled “suo padre” moment so familiar from The Marriage of Figaro and thousands of other plots in plays and novels. It’s warmly powerful. It may be a world “made for man and not for women” but Dixi Taylor’s Mrs Arbuthnot is resolutely her own woman.
Buckingham looks suitably caddish and cultivates his character’s outrageously entitled manner quite well. He also gets some of the best Wildean lines. And he hints rather nicely at heightened RP by gently rhyming “marry” with “very”. Unfortunately, though, he has a habit – presumably in the interests of naturalism – of dropping his voice at the ends of sentences or sometimes for whole clinching statements so that the effect is lost. And it’s mildly irritating. Incidentally, there are similar audibility problems with Vyvian Shaw as Lady Caroline Pontefract although she wins my admiration for being the only person I’ve seen on stage or screen in decades who knows how to knit properly.
Philip Ley’s imaginative set design features a central flat which, turned manually takes us from Lady Hunstanton’s garden, to her library to Mrs Arbuthnot’s sitting room. Lke many simple ideas, it’s effective.
Overall it’s enjoyable theatre and it’s good to see a revival of a play which asks questions about women’s role in society – still, to an extent, relevant 134 years after it was written.
