What better place to stage Oscar Wilde’s late 19th century comedy than in the Victorian splendour of Bolton’s wonderful Albert Halls building? Whilst the Bolton Octagon undergoes a renovation, the theatre has de-camped just around the corner to 670-seat theatre in the Albert Halls, built in 1873. The Importance of Being Earnest is Wilde’s most famous and best-loved play; a comedy of manners which pokes fun at the airs and graces of Victorian society before events escalate towards the brink of farce. The witty, absurd comedy is entirely defined by its Victorian British setting, which seemingly dictates every choice or utterance of the likeable characters.
Upon arrival in the auditorium, I was struck by how well the stage was dressed and how cleverly it integrated the Victoriana of the ceiling plasterwork as well as making a feature of the enormous oak organ that looms over the back of the stage. Set designer David Woodhead has re-imagined Algernon’s parlour as an elaborate photography studio, which works very well and suits the character’s penchant for whims. When the setting moves to Jack Worthing’s country garden, an unfurled sheet adorned with shrubs did the trick (and epitomised “back-drop” rather too literally).
I have to confess that the first act felt like it misfired somewhat. Wilde’s writing is weighty and dense, but needs delivering with playfulness to suit the characters’ impish, indulgent lifestyles. Lead actors Dean Fagan and Jack Hardwick manfully barrelled through the dialogue with pace and presented likeable figures, whilst Sarah Ball’s Lady Bracknell and Elizabeth Twells’s Gwendolen offered new dimensions to the tempo, but one can’t help but feel that the performance took a long time to find its voice. There is a certain musicality to comedy and in particular, Wilde’s Victorian upper-classes, which the cast didn’t quite find, so the witticisms and cutting asides often fired like damp squibs. The visual gags had more success, with Gwedolen’s physicality (as well as costume) portraying the repressed sexuality with abandon, much to the audience’s delight.
The second act felt like it was going the same way, with performances struggling to find the rhythm and feeling somewhat tethered; held back from the comic excesses of these broadly painted characters. That is until Jack Hardwick’s Algernon, now posing as his friend’s brother Ernest is thrust into the centre of events. Hardwick is finally unleashed by his director and is an actor transformed, eliciting laughs through physical comedy, facial tics and relishing in Wilde’s wit as the tempo increases. Melissa Lowe’s Cecily and Twells’s Gwendoline both benefit from the escalation of events as both actresses seem to relish the broader comedic style of pacey sparring.
In his programme notes, Director Suba Das writes extensively about the emerging technology of photography, the work of painter John Singer Sargent and the music of Tchaikovsky, which is rather revealing in and of itself. The production is so taken with conceptual quirks that it feels like working with actors was an afterthought. Das introduces a motif in which characters pose for photos during scenes after delivering zingers, which is bearable until it really counts. The Importance Of Being Earnest has one line of dialogue so memorable and so iconic, that every production of it has to freeze, as the audience hold their breath and Lady Bracknell’s incredulity finally explodes. It is crying out for the camera flash to capture “A Handbag?!!!” and Das inexplicably sidesteps his own comic set-up right at the point of its ultimate payoff. It is always a bugbear of mine when motifs are established only to be eschewed when they don’t have the legs to remain meaningful throughout the interpretation, and Das is guilty of it here, pretty much abandoning the idea by the interval. Another device is the sound effect of a chime (a ‘bing’) when the character makes an aside, signifying a wink to the audience, but without the emphasis on pitch and tempo in the performance, the sound accentuates a punchline that nobody particularly caught. This wasn’t helped by the Albert Hall’s acoustics, but the performers worked to make themselves heard with excellent diction and volume.
It is in the third act when Das and production designer Woodhead force their artistic interpretation past its tipping point. After the interval there is a dance routine between the two couples (to a Tchaikovsky soundtrack) which evokes the courting rituals and repressed desire of the couples, only to be followed by dialogue which reveals that the women are inside the house and the men did not follow them in. This renders the dance incongruous both narratively as well as thematically (particularly to the period). The incongruity continues with the set design, which now features five conspicuously hung Singer-Sargent paintings, the last of which (if looking from right to left) is ‘Black Atlas’ a portrait of a nude man which cuts off just below the waist, and the unfortunate shape of its frame suggests genitalia or perhaps a fig-leaf. This reveal of those paintings elicited a chuckle from some members of the audience who assumed it was meant to be a naughty schoolboy joke, but just left me confused. The emphasis on capturing photographs throughout the first act means that the audience naturally look to the portraits to see if they are snapshots of earlier scenes (mistakenly assuming that the photo motif would eventually pay off) and some characters could be represented by the paintings, whilst others could not, so they become distracting – “are they or aren’t they?” we wonder. The two male portraits have an eroticism about them, which could be in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality, but are completely out of place narratively, because Jack Worthing is a persona that Wilde works very hard to establish as boring and completely devoid of controversy (hence the more debonair man about town Earnest persona of the city), so how come nobody noticed his controversial paintings hung on his wall.
The Octagon never put on a bad production and this certainly wasn’t one either. The performances find their feet and the comedy emerges with charm as the play progresses and the design elements are all high quality. But the preoccupations of Das and his team all seem forced into the production, and ultimately detract from the play, rather than add to it.
Reviewer - Ben Hassouna-Smith
on - 7/6/19
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