Trevor Baxter’s adaptation of Wilde’s short story about free-will and destiny and the all consuming Victorian obsession with man’s double-life is given a full melodramatic workout under Christopher Luscombe’s direction. From a series of onstage cards which describe the forthcoming scenes in awful puns, to the musicians on stage who the cast nod to when they want to enrich the emotional register of their speeches, the whole production glitters with gleeful and deliberate contrivance. Wilde’s stylized and artificial world benefits from this air of unreality – nothing worse than a company attempting a realistic production of Lady Windermere’s Fan.
      Lee Mead plays Lord Arthur Savile as a hollow matinee heart-throb, a toff with more than a splinter of ice in his heart who meets a chiromancer at one of Lady Windermere’s parties. The chiromancer, Septimus Podgers, (played with a little too much suavity and dignity for a snakeoil salesmen by Gary Wilmot) prefers concealing himself and eavesdropping on prospective clients and then surprising them with the accuracy of his predictions. Blackmailed by Savile, Podgers is forced to read the aristocrat’s palm where he sees the peer will commit murder. The audience is left to wonder how much is predestined and how much is self-fulfilling prophecy. What is unclear is how such a resolute sceptic as Lord Arthur, who has already rumbled Podgers as a fraud, would believe in his predictions, unless this is a comment on mankind’s need to cling to irrationality. Podgers’ predictions have already forced fairly drastic measures from other clients: Kate O’Mara’s brittle Lady Windermere has decided to live in a balloon for a year.
      Lord Arthur Savile’s double-life begins in earnest with a nod to Dr Jekyll’s increasing estrangement from respectable society, respectability here evoked by his fiancee Sybil Merton played with forthright goodness and upper class stoicism by Louisa Clein. The church is represented by the forgetful and boisterous Dean of Chichester, a one man panto of a peformance, by Derren Nesbitt. With a modern sensibility it’s perhaps a little too easy to side with Lord Arthur as he embarks on an a series of misadventures reminiscent of the murderous disaffected Duke in Kind Hearts and Coronets. The only drawback to the comic melodrama is that the audience’s sympathies are too lightly engaged.
       Evil can only deepen such a shallow drawing room ornament as Lord Arthur and he begins his descent into the Victorian underworld where he plans to get a murder under his belt as quickly as possible. Savile is frightened he might otherwise murder his intended wife unless he satisfies fate first. Savile’s transformation into a morally depraved murderer is aided by a series of quick-fire scene changes that take in Victorian conservatories, a Dean’s study ticking with ornate clocks and the murky embankment by the statue of the Sphinx. Alexander McPherson’s sets are remarkable: decorative and full of rich influences. Particularly good was Podgers rooms filled with phrenological skulls, Egyptian mummies and a crocodile hanging from the ceiling: the sign of the apothecary made famous by Hogarth’s illustration in Marriage A-la-Mode. The quick-fire scene changes dramatize Lord Arthur Savile’s changing and disordered mind. The debate about human agency and pre-determinism remains open at the end of the play. The most insightful remark comes from Lord Arthur’s bride to be: Sybil suggests that it doesn’t matter if we’re free or not as long as we have (as we so clearly do) the illusion of freedom . Lord Arthur is wise to marry such a sensible young lady.
Daniel Jeffreys