Cast
Lane
Christopher Beeny

Cecily
Lucy Briggs Owen

Gwendolen
Jo Herbert

Merriman
Jim Hooper

Jack
Ryan Kiggell

Miss Prism
Julie Legrand

Ensemble
Harry Long

Ensemble
Penelope McGhie

Rev. Chasuble
Richard O’Callaghan

Ensemble
Kirsten Hazel Smith

Algernon
Dominic Tighe

Ensemble
Geoffrey Towers

Lady  Bracknell
Susan Wooldridge

Creative Team

Director
Irina Brown

Designer
Kevin Knight

Lighting Designer
Tim Mascall

Composer
Matthew Scott

Movement Director
Sue Lefton

Sound Designer
Fergus O'Hare

Casting Director
Pippa Ailion

Wilde’s fin-de-siecle farce of dual identities and challenging inversions, when telling the truth becomes a last resort (and a pretty vulgar one at that), is reinvigorated here in Kevin Knight’s wonderful design. This is no Victorian drawing room farce but an alternative, glittering world that looks all the better for dispensing with the usual stuffy props of Victoriana.
      The stage in the first act had a bold sweeping ramp leading down to a mirrored drawing room (reflecting the audience huddling anxiously from a mild rain-fall). The set resembled the penguin enclosure in London Zoo as designed by Aubrey Beardsley with servants and a four-piece band in evening dress descending the curved ramp and this seems true to the spirit of the play. After all, Wilde presents us with jewelled, clockwork penguins and their unreality was amplified by the set’s big empty spaces.
      Dominic Tieghe’s insufferably smug Algy - (a sort of King Penguin) -munching on cucumber sandwiches, was nicely contrasted by the booming, big-boned Worthing. Kiggell’s heavy tread and bulk lent itself admirably to the character’s befuddlement but he was also nimble on his feet when required to battle on the table with Algy for his cigarette case.
      The play’s subtext of homo-eroticism was played down and the pursuit of Bunburying was presented as a defence of the double life as a means to escape creative stagnation. Both straight-laced Worthing and the cynical poseur Algy have decided that invention of an imaginary character is the only way out of the frump and hogwash of modern life; the play deals with their growing maturity and the death of their alter-egos as well as the possibility that they can integrate the wilder more unruly elements into their married lives.
      The stage was transformed in the second act into an equally unreal rose garden with a doll’s house in the distance representing Worthing’s ancestral home. The servants perfomed a slow motion balletic dance, watering the flowers with sequins and glitter. Lady Bracknell was a commanding vision in purple satin with a wonderfully over-the-top hat which looked like she was supporting an entire pampas clump. Her withering authoritarian stance brought her daughter Gwendolen to her knees like an obedient dog and both actresses, Jo Herbert (Gwendolen) and Susan Woodldridge (Lady Bracknell), managed to bring reality and, in Gwendolen’s case, vulnerability to overbearing upper class caricatures.
      The theme of duality is carried over into Cecily’s guardian the prim Miss Prism (Julie Legrand) who has a secret life as an unpublished author of a three-decker novel. It is her absent-mindedness owing to her work that leads her to misplace the baby, here a definite warning about the perils of authorship. Legrand played Prism with febrile glitter and panache hoping to divert herself from her growing passion for the Reverend Chasuble and his daring pagan illusions by an interest in German grammar.
      Lucy Briggs Owen brought an openness and energy to Cecily. Modern mannerisms, eye-rolling and exaggerated gestures, made her an adolescent of today. Her double life and full-on eroticism had been channelled into her diary and a series of love-letters to herself. The play can sometimes feel like a wonderful ornamental wreath, elaborate decorations around a hollow centre, but this production really charmed.
Daniel Jeffreys