Simon Collins reviews an unusual production of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance at the Richmond Theatre...
OUR VERDICT
There is a pleasure to be had in seeing this play since it is the least performed of Wilde’s four notable plays of the 1890s. The least performed because it is the weakest. Structurally, it comprises two plays. The first half is set on the terrace of a stately home, Hunstanton Chase, later in the drawing-room, where various members of the aristocracy and gentry take tea and exchange epigrams: “The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.” Foxhunting is “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.” “We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.” On it goes, even today, the same terrace, the same teacups.
There is no story; this is straightforward social satire, celebrating whilst denigrating the hypocrisy of the upper classes and might almost have been taken down verbatim by St Oscar himself in his alter ego as Lord Illingworth, a charismatic, older, established man, who critiques the world with outrageous wit. He is the Dark Lord who appears in so many of Wilde’s works. He directs then dominates then possesses a young, handsome man. Here it is Gerald Arbuthnot who is as happy as a puppy to be offered the position of Illingworth’s secretary: “It means everything to me – things that were out of the reach of hope before may be within hope’s reach now.” The homoerotic attraction remains unconscious.
After the interval, in the second half, the play becomes a melodrama. The setting is domestic, the sitting room in Mrs Arbuthnot’s house. She is the woman of no importance. All these years she has kept from Gerald the secret that Illingworth is his father. She was seduced by the promise of marriage but Illingworth abandoned her. As a fallen woman she has suffered a life of shame and poverty, having lost respectability herself struggling to give her son a respectable start. Illingworth is socially admired for his seductions. There is one rule for men, another for women.
The cast strives gamely to make the play relevant to current values. But the iniquities of the past were complex and based more on tradition and class than gender. Nowadays it is hard to imagine what a “fallen woman” was, that a child born out of wedlock was a walking catastrophe, or why anyone cared about respectability. When, having discovered the truth, Gerald pleads with his mother to marry the monstrous Illingworth, today’s audience thinks he must be mad. But a century ago the institution of marriage and the fixity of its roles meant that married you could breathe like a normal human being and not lumber along in the dusk like a freak of nature.
Unfortunately, in this play, Wilde was hobbled by his own rhetorical style. Though the predicament of the Arbuthnots is touching, the artifice of the language loses our sympathy. Even in states of high emotion, the characters declaim inappropriately. For instance, in the final argument: “Don’t be deceived, George. Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely if ever do they forgive them.” The passion is flat.
After ten years running Shakespeare’s Globe, the director, Dominic Dromgoole, has turned to plays with a proscenium. He has a deft and sure hand but there are touches of eccentricity in this production. Why on earth would you include as bits of stage business moments of physical comedy in representing the English aristocracy, the world’s most refined social milieu? Again, some of the casting seemed odd.
Surprisingly, an entr’acte. When the curtain came down the butler stepped through the folds holding a violin, followed by Roy Hudd in his archdeacon togs to sing Polly Perkins of Paddington Green, with Gerald Arbuthnot playing the guitar, accompanied by Lord Rufford on the trumpet. Roy Hudd is surely among the most charming men in Christendom, and the three extraneous interludes in themselves are delightful, but splicing music hall songs onto a Wilde play needs a rationale. Could it be that the director, out of momentum, has continued the knockabout that entertained the groundlings at the Globe?
Whatever the explanation, the play was memorable, and the mood of the evening in this lovely theatre was warm and comfortable.
Richmond Theatre, The Green, Richmond, TW9 1QJ 16th to 21st September 2019 (book here)
