At first sight the posters for the production were a trifle alarming; it was difficult to date the hats on those two silhouetted heads, but surely they were a good deal later than 1900. Yet Oscar Wilde’s play opened in 1893 and hinged on a new variation of the recurrent Victorian theme of the woman with a past. How could you make such a story dramatic if you transplanted it into the permissive twentieth century? By that time, would anybody still have cared?
But there was really no need to worry. In fact, it was long after the Second World War before attitudes began to change, and onstage Annie Duarte’s direction has swept us back to the mid-twentieth century, when unmarried motherhood was still a disaster, so it all works extremely well.
The plot can be told in a few sentences. At a prolonged country house party, Lord Illingworth meets Gerald Arbuthnot, a struggling young bank clerk, and offers him the post of his secretary, without realising that the boy is his own illegitimate son. Gerald’s mother, who has been living in seclusion nearby, is promptly invited to the house, where she is horrified to find that Lord Illingworth is the man who had refused to marry her and so condemned her to a life in the shadows. Gerald, of course, is longing to take up the offer, but, though she begs him to refuse, she cannot bring herself to tell him why. In all her struggles, Lord Illingworth outmanoeuvres her with triumphant ease.
He, meanwhile, has been absorbed in a bickering flirtation with Mrs Allonby, a married woman, who challenges him, out of sheer devilment, to kiss Hester Worsley, a pretty but prim young American heiress. When he does so, Hester screams; and Gerald, who is in love with her, rushes to her defence in blind fury. He is ready to kill his own father, and the only way Mrs Arbuthnot can stop him is by blurting out the truth. The next morning, the balance of power has changed. Gerald wants no more to do with his father, except that his mother should marry him; but, though Lord Illingworth is willing, she is the one who refuses her consent. Finally, Hester declares her love for Gerald and sets off for a new life with mother and son, leaving the fashionable world behind them.
Such a bald summary leaves out a whole gallery of characters and the wonderful continuous exchange of wit that gives the play its flavour. That brilliant dialogue, so much admired these days, did not win Wilde many friends in the nineteenth-century press. Three years later, Bernard Shaw sardonically reported that the critics seemed to think ‘such epigrams can be turned out by the score by anyone lightminded enough to descend to such frivolity. As far as I can see, I am the only person in London who cannot write an Oscar Wilde play at will.’
This was Wilde’s second West End success; he had made his name with Lady Windermere’s Fan. The two plays are curiously alike. They both contain a mother who dares not reveal her story; in both there is a very young lady who is led by experience to give up her uncompromisingly puritanical views; and each has a sophisticated man who argues the case against conventional morality. But this is certainly not the mixture as before; the second play is an answer to the first—almost its rebuttal. In the first, the young puritan is shown to be in the wrong; in the second, she is utterly justified. It is as if a chess master, after taking the white queen with the black pieces, turns the board round and easily checkmates the black king.
Annie Duarte gradually lets us see that all that clever conversation is more than just shocking naughtiness and actually hides something really nasty. Although it has been bowdlerised for the theatre audiences of the 1890s, Mrs Allonby’s challenge is a muted echo of the hideous pact in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Lord Illingworth and Mrs Allonby have no taste for love; even the pursuit of pleasure is too mild for them; their jaded palates demand the spice of cruelty.
But wait a moment! The play is very funny. How can we be laughing at such an ugly theme? How indeed? Let us start from the other end with a look at the cast, beginning (in defiance of the usual practice) with the smallest parts; in this production they are perhaps the most surprising.
Playing a servant in a Victorian play is usually like carrying a spear at Stratford, but this time the butler, Farquhar, as played by Stephen Clarke, is quite exciting, with a witty, explanatory prologue, certainly not written by Wilde. We are also given two extra characters; in addition to Simon Malpas as the smoothly efficient footman, Francis, we see Graham Fitzgerald, as Christopher, and Cameron Houston, as Henry, the clumsy beginner who gets everything exactly wrong. These four have been choreographed by Margaret Pritchard-Houston, together with at least two maids—Cristina Bancora and (in the absence of Lourdes Busquets Ferre) Margaret herself—in some wonderfully balletic changes of scene, thereby overcoming one of the chief problems of performing in church.
While we’re on the subject, Margaret Willmer’s ingenious designs give us charming and vivid settings of one garden and two contrasting rooms with amazing economy of effect. They made a pleasant background for the elegant costumes by Jane Mayfield.
Among the ladies and gentlemen, the action is opened by Patrice Dorling, who really convinces us as Lady Caroline Pontefract she has no idea how absurd she is. John Willmer plays her husband, Sir John, with a resigned patience that tears your heart. Quite soon we meet Jolyon Bowling as Mr Kelvil, the slightly déclassé MP, preposterously trying to promote purity. Next comes Adrian Hughes as Lord Alfred Rufford, whose chief occupation is being in debt; but for that, he would have nothing to think about. Sarah Day plays Lady Stutfield as an enthusiastic ingénue, trying to learn from Mrs Allonby how to be wicked, and Stephen Tucker is the blandly optimistic Archdeacon Daubeny, full of cheerful resignation about his wife’s sufferings. Nina Trebilcock is delightfully endearing as their hostess, Lady Hunstanton, whose innocence seems to be protected by her perpetual absence of mind.
Now for the movers and shakers! At the beginning Miranda Glen makes it easy for us to believe that Hester Worsley, the little American puritan, has no experience of life at all; she simply recites what her elders have taught her. Nathaniel Fairnington gives Gerald Arbuthnot the touching self-consciouness of a very young man a little out of his social depth. As his mother, Emma Lyndon-Stanford has the beauty and dignity almost of a Christian martyr.
Finally we come to the two villains of the piece, who both rise to their full stature of horror in Act IV; Hoda Ali as Mrs Allonby stroking young Gerald with her riding-crop; the Lord Illingworth of Jon Waters dropping his sophisticated mask and descending to vile abuse of the woman whose life he has ruined. This evening, however, it is the good who have the last laugh.
A Woman of No Importance
Bill Fry