Turn your glance to the right as you enter the church’s main gate and you will see the statue known as ‘the Mourning Maiden’, standing on the other side of Church Row as if presiding over everything within her view. Her graceful authority guards the remains of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who in 1892 commissioned a second comedy from his friend Oscar Wilde after the success of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’.
In April 1893 the Haymarket Theatre staged to an eager audience the first performance of Wilde’s new play ‘A Woman Of No Importance’, which was well received by a public hungry for another helping of Wilde’s satircal wit and situational confusion. The story goes that Tree felt impelled to ban Wilde from his final week’s rehearsals of the production in which, as well as directing, Tree was playing the pivotal role of the dandy Lord Illingworth. Presumably Wilde was interfering in Tree’s direction and it’s not difficult to imagine how, with his hands so full, Tree found it impossible to tolerate suggestions from the author in the front row! Tree is on record as having found the plot particularly impressive, for it turns on knife-edge comedy, sudden disturbing revelations and moments of emotional sword-play – not the kind of thing a director wants interrupted in rehearsal as opening night approaches. Perhaps less widely known than Wilde’s other comedies, the play nevertheless contains a number of well-quoted references including the famous definition of fox-hunting – ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. Audiences familiar with his other work will recognise in both plot and dialogue echoes of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and a foreshadowing of Wilde’s two later plays ‘An Ideal Husband’ and ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ and will find themselves in familiar territory with the devastatingly mischievous humour which both delights and points audiences towards Wilde’s underlying criticism of hypocrisy and careless privilege.We hope our production will carry its feel-good factor into the chill of late November, with its warm spring setting of a country house party at Hunstanton Hall – pronounced ‘Hunston’ by those in the know, and wrongly as you will hear by those from beyond the comfortable English fold….We hope it will make you both laugh and weep – preferably in the right places! – and we hope that we will do justice to this kaleidoscope of a play, born of the friendship between its famously flamboyant author and the director-manager who lies at rest in Hampstead.
Hampstead Players website
A Woman of No Importance
Annie Duarte